Just say maybe

By Richard C. Morais

Holland, one wellspring of American Puritanism, has become the
Western World's most permissive society when it comes to marijuana and
hasish. For a good cause?

AT THE SIBERIA cafe on Amsterdam's elegant Brouwersgracht canal, yellow
tulips fill pretty vases, and customers quietly read newspapers while
sipping mango or caramelflavored teas. Siberia is as civilized as a
Viennese tearoom, and this is the Netherlands, a wellspring of American
Puritanism. So it's a shock to discover that the house speciality is "Shiva
Bhang," a sticky marijuana andherb ball eaten with yogurt.

Siberia sells an estimated $ 1,000 of hash and marijuana a day. It's all
done in the open, with the Dutch government collecting taxes on the
receipts. The cafe's customers order from a drug "menu" some 20
illustrative baggies of hashish and marijuana tacked to a board openly
displayed at the counter. From a feltlined diamond merchant's steel case
behind the counter, the house dealer sells twogram bags of "Skunk" and
"Haze" and "Thai" for around $ 15 each. A professorial type with gray hair
buys a bag of "Afghani" hash, dipping his hand into a tin of complimentary
rolling paper before settling on a sundrenched stool for a chat and a
smoke.

For the past 20 years the Dutch have taken their own approach to the drug
problems facing all developed nations. IN 1976 they cracked down, hard, on
dealers and users of hard drugs heroin, opium, cocaine and the like. But
they also decriminalized the sale and use of small quantities of socalled
soft drugs marijuana and hashish.

It's fashionable in Europe right now to beat up on Holland for its lax
policies on soft drugs. French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac threatened to
close Holland's border with France because of them; the French parliament
suspended the implementation of the European Union's Schengen agreement,
which was to allow free movement of people across some borders. A
topranking Bonn official followed up with a demand that the Dutch make a
"fundamental change" in their drug policy.

Last year the Dutch embassy in Washington had to defend itself from a
scathing attack by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. But have the
cities checked out the statistics? According to estimates by the United
Nations International Drug Control Programme, over 7% of the U.S.
population "abuses" cannabis, compared with under 4% in Holland. Various EU
studies indicate that Holland has 1.6 harddrug addicts per 1,000
inhabitants. The number compares with 2.5 in France, 3 in Italy and 5.3 in
Switzerland.

The U.S. wasn't included in these studies, but others show that the U.S.
is still by far the largest consumer of illicit drugs, despite the
continuing multibilliondollar war on drugs. The 119 million tons of
cocaine seized in the U.S. in 1993 alone had a street value of some $ 15
billion. Some 10 million Americans smoke pot every month, and, unlike our
President, most of them inhale. In decriminalizing the possession of up to
an ounce of marijuana or hashish in 1976 and at the same time massively
increasing sentences for harddrug dealing, the Dutch authorities had a
clear goal in mind. The authorities wanted to drive a wedge between the
harddrug and softdrug communities, between casual users and bigtime
dealers. It wasn't the psychoactive properties of hashish, the authorities
reasoned, but contact with the criminal subculture that leads to serious
antisocial behavior.

In this plan the authorities have succeeded brilliantly. A flurry of
entrepreneurial softdrug businesses, all taxed and part of the formal
economy, have sprung up. The number of "coffee shops" in Amsterdam, for
example, has grown to 450, each selling on average $ 150,000 worth of soft
drugs per year. The flashy Bulldog Palace on Leidseplein, the Times Square
of Amsterdam, serves food and drinks in a large outdoor cafe. Downstairs
you can buy bags of "Haze" and "Skunk" cannabis, tequilaflavored lollipops
and Bulldog T shirts at $ 17 a throw.

But remember the policy: Drugs are okay, up to a point. The Dutch police
instantly close a coffee shop if there is even a whiff of harddrug
dealing.

With so much to lose, softdrug entrepreneurs hire bouncers to eject
anyone using or dealing in hard drugs. A. C. M. Jansen, an economist at the
University of Amsterdam, has studied the coffee shop phenomenon. Jansen
reports that in small coffee shops other customers will berate and chase
away addicts looking for heroin.

The Dutch cops, in other words, now have the softdrug communities helping
them contain and discipline the harddrug users.

The drug policy has created any number of opportunities for young
entrepreneurs. Consider a man known simply as Wernard, for example. In the
early 1970s Wernard was a coffee shop pioneer, selling drugs smuggled
through Zurich's Kloten airport. In the mid1980s he teamed up with
Americans who brought to Holland seeds and knowhow. Together they bred,
cloned and developed new cannabis strains that would flourish in Holland.
Today these potent strains of marijuana plants are called "Nederweed."

"Nederweed" has spawned the multimilliondollar Positronics, Wernard's
"grow shop" department store. At the main counter salesmen advise home
growers on whether they should buy the $ 106 digital hygrometers or the $
65 miniindustrial ventilators or the $ 17 twoliter fertilizers. A home
grower's starter indoor kit with lamp costs around $ 705, fits in a closet
and will yield annually 2 kilos of highgrade pot during five harvests.
Wernard even sells $ 20 "licenses" that tell the police, should they
investigate, that the onelight Positronics "system" yields only enough pot
for personal use.

We ate lunch in De Cantina, Wernard's vegetarian coffee shop. The place
was packed, not only with locals but also with Americans, Germans, Swiss
and Italians. Wernard, 45, sells around $ 1,000 worth of pot a day from De
Cantina and has installed a "test" bar De Cantina is a kind of
Starbuck's to the softdrug trade. Marijuana pipes have been fitted with
small vacuum cleaners normally used to clean the interior of a computer.
When lit, the pipes blow a steady stream of cannabis smoke. Thus smokers
can inhale and choose their preferred flavor.

Wernard is coy about his profits, but they're sizable. He charges $ 1.50 a
"taste"; an employee travels down a tightly packed line of tourists so the
"taste" bowl of pot yields several grams worth of revenue.

By decriminalizing marijuana and hashish, and making the business visible,
Holland not only collects a lot of taxes it would otherwise never see, but
also keeps a lot of drug money inside the country. Ten years ago all the
soft drugs consumed in Holland were smuggled in by organized crime rings
from Morocco, Afghanistan and Turkey. But due to the innovations of Wernard
and others, there are now over 35,000 home growers in Holland. The result:
About 65% of the $ 500 million in soft drugs consumed today is Dutch
homegrown. "The small growers' technical sophistication pushed out
criminals," says Amsterdam University's Jansen.

Holland's professional potheads sound like French vintners, waxing lyrical
about how Scythians inhaled smoldering cannabis seeds; how spiced "bhang"
milkshakes were drunk in honor of Kali, the Hindu goddess; how medieval
Islamic Sufis developed the technique of rubbing the marijuana resin into
hashish. A drug so entwined with the culture of man just be treated with
respect.

Lately the entrepreneurs are tapping the drug's rich history for modern
commercial uses. Emperor Nero's surgeon, Dioscorides, named cannabis sativa
and praised its healing properties. Today Wernard is developing
"mediweeds," working with doctors who prescribe pot to patients. Another
entrepreneur is supplying 20 kilos of cannabis to a prestigious Berlin
institute for AIDS research.

Hemp, a strain of cannabis sativa that for centuries produced the tough
fiber used in ropes and cloth, is an important byproduct for these
businessmen. Adam Dunn and Douglas Mignolla American entrepreneurs in
their late 20s are now selling hemp fashions in Amsterdam. Their Hemp
Works store features hemp lingerie, hemp jeans and cannabis shampoo. "Too
much competition selling cannabis seeds," says Dunn.

Amsterdam is a libertarian's fantasy. Every November it hosts a cannabis
trade fair known as the "Cannabis Cup." From around the world thousands of
"narco tourists" descend to taste the hottest new strain of pot, catch up
on the latest technological developments and watch a hemp fashion show.

A frequent winner of the Cannabis Cup is 47yearold Ben Dronkers from
Rotterdam. He owns cannabis businesses with revenues, he says, of $ 12
million, including the world's largest marijuana seed bank and 3,000 acres
of hemp that he is turning into absorbant hemp chips for horse bedding at a
factory in north Holland.

Dronkers also knows how to sell to the narco tourists. During the Cannabis
Cup he sells $ 117 tickets for his Cannabis Castle Tour. A bus takes
tourists to an estate outside Amsterdam to see "grow rooms and greenhouses
where awardwinning strains were developed." The tour includes meals, live
acts and "free samples."

We paid $ 3.50 to visit Dronkers' Hash Marihuana Hemp Museum in downtown
Amsterdam. On display are ancient Indian pipes, a 1944 New York Academy of
Medicine study recommending the legalization of marijuana and a video
showing how pot is grown. The place was full of welloff baby boomers from
the U.S. and Europe.

These narco tourists are a boon to Holland's anemic economy. They buy an
estimated $ 180 million in cannabis a year directly from coffee shops
and spend a lot more staying in three and fourstar hotels, eating at
expensive restaurants and visiting Holland's other tourist sites. Narco
tourism may account for as much as 25% of Holland's $ 5.3 billion tourist
income.

It's this movement of the smokers back and forth across their borders that
drives Germany and France bananas. They've got a point. In a frontierless
Europe, Holland's approach often translates into crossborder drug deals.
Coffee shops have sprung up in the border towns like Arnhem, Venlo and
Maastricht. Holland has become the EU's largest producer of
personalityaltering Ecstasy tablets.

But Holland is not as detractors claim a narco state. There is
little corruption. While cannabis is decriminalized, it is still illegal,
and the authorities will smash bigtime organized crime dealers. In 1994
the police seized 524,000 pounds of cannabis, four times what was seized in
fingerpointing France. They closed down 27 highly organized crime rings
involved in drug trafficking. They netted 18,000 pounds of cocaine, 541
pounds of amphetamines, 473 pounds of heroin. It's a myth that Holland is
all tolerance.

Under intense pressure from its neighbors, Holland is promising a wave of
crackdowns, including cutting the number of coffee shops in half. But it
won't fundamentally change its hard drugs/soft drugs policy. Says Bernhard
Scholten, the Amsterdam police's foreign affairs spokesman, "It's better to
have all this in the open so we can keep an eye on it."