Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. Hello you're listening to the BBC World Service and now the Witness History

podcast with me Bob Howard. Today I'm taking you back to Amsterdam in the

early 1970s when many young Dutch people were hippies enjoying free love,

psychedelic music and smoking cannabis. But in the Netherlands, as in pretty much the rest of the world at the time,

smoking this drug was illegal.

So how did the city become known as the home of cannabis and coffee shops?

I've been talking to an Amsterdamer who owned one of those early cafes.

His cafe was called Mello Yellow.

They call me Mello, Yellow.

In 1973, Bernard Browning, having dropped out of training to be a teacher, was in his early 20s, and living a hippie lifestyle in Amsterdam.

Smoking cannabis was a major part of it.

Whenever you knew somebody who was selling some cannabis, you would buy some for a couple of hundred guilders and sell it in little pieces to your friends in order to have something left over for yourself to smoke for free.

And we used to say maybe we should open up a coffee shop or a tea house.

We can just sell the tea and have a free smoke at the same time.

There were already plenty of coffee shops and tea houses in Amsterdam where you could buy soft drugs like

cannabis but they felt risky with many different dealers selling all sorts of drugs.

Sometimes 2030 guys who were all offering the same things but for different prices and it was kind of shady and vague and sometimes risky because sometimes you would buy something, take it home and when you open up the aluminium foil you would find out that it was just a dog food or something like that.

...