Mellow Yellow coffeeshop Mellow Yellow was unsuccessfully raided by police several times. Unpackaged cannabis, bought from wholesalers including drug lord Klaas Bruinsma, was hidden behind secret doors and shutters. In 1975, the concept was adopted by a shop named Russia situated on the same street as Mellow Yellow and was followed by another coffee shop called The Bulldog. Now there are 223 such coffee shops in Amsterdam. Bruining also runs Stichting Mediwiet (Medi Cannabis Foundation), a group that supports the legalization of growing marijuana for medicinal uses. The shop was closed at the strike of the New Year in 2017, due to new
Cannabis in Italy regional distribution requests and the authorized sale of the product. The annual legal consumption of medical cannabis has grown from 40 kg in 2013 to nearly 10 times that in 2017, and the demand is expected to further quadruple as the value of cannabis is more widely understood by doctors. The high demand caused pharmacies throughout Italy to run out of medical cannabis by September 2017, prompting many patients with prescriptions to turn to the black market, while in January 2018 the importation of cannabis was extended to Canada. The potential revenue from medicinal cannabis is estimated to be more