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FREE THE WEED 06
A Column by John Sinclair
Since the late 1980s the epitome of the American experience in Amsterdam is the annual Cannabis Cup celebration organized by High Times magazine and held during Thanksgiving week.
The Cannabis Cup is a week-long blow-out attended by hundreds of American marijuana fanciers and their counterparts in the Netherlands and throughout the world. It’s centered on a formal competition among the seed companies of Holland and the coffeeshops of Amsterdam to be recognized for the excellence of their produce and the superiority of their service.
Suddenly free from the strictures of American society and the pervasive terrorism of the War on Drugs, these liberated pilgrims from the U.S.A. flow through the ancient streets of Amsterdam from coffeeshop to coffeeshop, pausing only to sample the distinctive strains offered at each stop.
A vast cannabis exposition, speeches, lectures and workshops fill up the daytime hours, and dance-concerts featuring top American alt-pop stars and underground bands are staged at the Milkweg club and other local venues each night. The whole thing peaks on Thanksgiving night with a gala presentation of the Cannabis Cup awards.
It’s easy for Americans in Amsterdam to find common ground in the coffeeshops and internet cafes where marijuana and hashish are freely smoked and important human connections are made. Quite simply, we come here to witness and enjoy the essential civility of a social order that allows for the desire of its citizens and their visitors to get high and explore their individuality without fear of official interference.
My love affair with Amsterdam began when Steve Hager of High Times graciously invited me to preside over the 1998 festivities as High Priest of the Cannabis Cup, and I’ve returned every November since. As a confirmed life-long marijuana smoker since my first joint in 1962, I’ve served three years in prison for possession of marijuana and I’ve lived my entire adult life under threat of imminent apprehension, prosecution and further imprisonment just because I like to get high on this innocuous herb.
But in Amsterdam this evil atmosphere disappears without a trace, and all of a sudden one finds oneself in a social setting where nobody even cares if you want to get high. What’s more, you can stop by a coffeshop and cop grams of top-grade smoke right over the counter, sit down and roll up a joint or stuff a pipe and smoke it to your heart’s content. Nobody cares! You’re free to get as high as you like, and you can carry your stash with you when you leave the shop with never a worry about being stopped and frisked by the coppers.
For the American pot smoker, this uncomplicated experience creates a tremendous sense of liberation and personal freedom. All the problems so long encountered in the United States are dissolved in a single stroke, and all the pressures associated with drug use in the Homeland just melt away for the entire duration of your stay. You can relax and be yourself, completely free from the fear of slipping up and inadvertently revealing the criminal nature of your preferred recreational activity.
Dutch social polity seems intelligently ordered, although—like white people everywhere—the natives have a difficult time adjusting to the recent influx of darker-skinned people from Turkey, Morocco, and the former Dutch colonies of Surinam, Indonesia and the Antilles. But when social problems crop up, the citizenry generally seeks to devise solutions that balance the contrasting needs of the contesting parties instead of trying to crush the deviant elements into the ground.
Perhaps most pertinent in this connection is the Dutch response to the emergence in the 1960s and ’70s of a new generation of young people determined to get high on whatever substances would get them off, with a special emphasis on marijuana and hashish.
Unlike the United States, where the same phenomenon resulted in the ruthless and incomprehensible War on Drugs which has raged for more than 40 years now, the government of the Netherlands determined that the recreational drug user posed no threat to the social order per se and effectively decriminalized individual drug use of every kind.
Simply put, the user of recreational drugs is not subject to arrest for getting high. While the sale and distribution of opiates and stimulants remains highly illegal, smokers of marijuana and hashish are allowed to obtain their favorite substances right over the counter at the ubiquitous coffeeshops and cannabis cafes that thrive all over town. Seeds and sprouts are available for sale to those who wish to grow their own, and there are “smart shops” that cater to the psychedelic explorers among us by offering a wide variety of consciousness-expanding plants and chemicals.
Another great thing about Holland is that very few people are armed. As a devout urbanite I’ve learned to negotiate a dangerous social construct populated by heavily armed citizens and even more murderously equipped authorities whose constant presence serves to intensify and exacerbate the terrorism of everyday life in the increasingly cruel and heartless society we inhabit. But in Holland not even the police on the street carry guns, and only the most deadly serious professional criminals are equipped with weapons of individual destruction.
There’s a whole lot to be said for an unarmed citizenry, and it’s amazing to see how easy life can be absent the presence of a pistol in every other pocket. Another crippling layer of physical and psychic armor is soon stripped away, and things begin to look brighter and brighter by the day.
Even the fear of being misunderstood by the natives is dissipated when one finds that Dutch schools teach the English language from grades K through 12, and most of the people one encounters can converse quite fluently in our own tongue.
Then there’s the considerable physical charm of the city itself. Everywhere in Amsterdam one is struck by the architectural beauty and utilitarian logic of the urban construct and the way it works to serve the basic needs of the populace. A highly efficient public transportation system moves people effortlessly around town by tram (streetcar), bus and subway. Streets and public plazas are named for poets and painters and philosophers, and museums, concert houses and cultural institutions abound.
Amsterdam is a great place to visit, and the Cannabis Cup festivities are something you won’t encounter anywhere else. But with the recent rise of the medical marijuana community in America High Times has begun recognizing the cannabis industry and its beneficiaries in a number of cities across the United States. Now they’re coming to Michigan to hold a Cannabis Cup in Detroit’s Eastern Market on October 15-16, and I think you will want to be there. I know I will!
—Amsterdam
February 13, 2004 >
August 24, 2011
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