POST-COLD WAR, SMOKING POT COMMONPLACE AMONG CZECHS

Marijuana Now So Popular Authorities Starting To Worry

PRAGUE, Czech Republic -- The man with the dancing eyebrows and the
blurry tattoo stands in the chilled night and opens the barred gate to
his apartment. A dog sleeps on the bed; a snapping turtle floats
inside a glass coffee table. A fan hums and a hot light glows in the
bathroom, where 11 marijuana plants ripple like a tiny field against
the porcelain.

Sit, says J.X. Dolezal, a Czech version of the late Hunter S. Thompson
who has written books such as "How to Take Drugs" and "Stoned County."
He opens a box. There's a scrape and grind, a sprinkle across paper, a
nimble roll of fingers, a lick, a match strike, a curl of smoke and a
smile.

"Do you mind?" asks Dolezal, his face slightly obscured as he
exhales. "Excuse me if I don't offer you any. This marijuana's often
too strong for my visitors. I had to resuscitate one guy for almost
an hour once. You know, a higher percentage of people here grow their
own marijuana than probably anywhere. It's typically Czech: a
do-it-yourself nation."

The Czechs do like their weed. A 2005 report by the European
Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction found that 22 percent
of Czechs between ages 15 and 34 smoked marijuana at least once during
the previous year -- the highest percentage in Europe. The nation's
cannabis culture is imbued with the whimsical ethos of the hippie
movement: guys growing dope in fields, on balconies and in bathrooms,
and sharing with friends.

"I've never paid for pot, and I never would," said Filip Hubacek, a
university student majoring in social sciences. "I don't mind paying
for my gym, but not for my pot."

Selling or offering marijuana is illegal here, but the law is
permeable, containing a passage that could have been lifted from a
novel by Franz Kafka, the country's great surrealist writer. It's not
a crime to possess "no amount larger than a small amount," according
to the statute. The metric rationalizations and extrapolations around
such an ambiguous definition are debated with gleeful fervor amid
smoke wisps in clubs and in apartments such as Dolezal's.

"We have to be concerned with the use of marijuana," said Viktor
Mravcik, director of a national agency that studies drug use and
addiction. "It's becoming a political problem. It's not something we
are proud of. One of our targets is to stop marijuana and ecstasy in
the young population."

Marijuana and other drugs weren't widespread during the Cold War. The
communist regime considered grass an "imperial scourge" of the West,
another degradation to the worker's soul. But when the Velvet
Revolution swept away the Iron Curtain in 1990, the scent of pot
became a symbol of freedom, moving beyond the counterculture to an
increasingly liberal mainstream. Hybrids were imported from the
Netherlands, and Czechs experimented with potency, hydro-planting and
the vagaries of bongs and pipes.

The buzz on weed was out. But Czechs are wary of sharing a good thing
and -- with a history of oppression from the Hapsburgs to the Nazis to
the communists -- are suspicious of interlopers.

"There's a drug called Pervitin," said Martin Titman, a therapist at
the Drop In, a drug counseling center in Prague. "It's a kind of
amphetamine that was made in Germany during World War II to energize
soldiers before battle. The recipe was lost in the 1960s, but the
Czech underground discovered it and has kept it as a national treasure
since. It won't share the recipe with German organized crime."

The same goes for expatriates who arrived as a "soft drug" tourism
market evolved alongside the more insular marijuana culture of native
Czechs.

A raconteur with a cantankerous side, Dolezal, who reminds a listener
that his writings helped shape the nation's marijuana culture, doesn't
want a bunch of stoned, goofy-faced tourists roaming around the
castles and falling into the Vltava River. Despite his entreaties,
olive-skinned dealers whisper in alleys at night, selling a gram of
this, a bag of that to Russians, Brits and Americans.

"We want to legalize marijuana," said Dolezal, tapping on his coffee
table to check the turtle. "But we can't sell it in cafes like in
Amsterdam, because we'd get all the unemployed Germans coming here. We
don't want foreigners consuming marijuana in public. It could demean
marijuana. We like the system where a friend gives it to or sells it
to his friends."

Mravcik estimates about 12 tons of marijuana is smoked each year in
this country of 10.2 million people. Prevalence among young people has
doubled since 1995. Unlike heroin and amphetamines, marijuana is not
classified as high-risk, but it is raising concern in a country where
drug treatment centers didn't begin in earnest until 2001. Today,
3,000 heroin addicts are in treatment, compared with zero in 2000.

"We don't think marijuana is a gate to other drugs," Titman, the drug
therapist, said. "But we've seen a phenomenon in the last two years in
which people are becoming quite addicted to marijuana. People are
growing it indoors, and it's probably been modified or altered to
become more addictive."

Costing as little as $5 a gram, marijuana is cut and rolled throughout
Czech society. "There's seven profiles of marijuana smokers: computer
programmers, environmental activists, university students, teenagers,
villagers in Moravia who now smoke joints instead of drinking plum
brandy, reggae music listeners and 80-year-old ladies buying marijuana
for their husbands who have Parkinson's and other illnesses," Titman
said.

It's just after dusk when Dolezal settles into his chair and lights a
joint the size of a cigarillo. The scent whirls, and he is happy. His
dog hasn't budged on the bed. His snapping turtle is half-submerged in
the coffee table, where Dolezal has scattered pictures submitted to
the magazine Reflex, which recently held a contest for the best photo
of a marijuana plant.

"Look at these, beautiful," he says. "Plants are just like wines. You
have darks and whites -- the whites are most popular. The white widow,
white shark, sweet tooth. Ahhh, the white widow is my favorite."

A man of zeitgeist, Dolezal sees himself as a prophet whose vision has
been realized. He wrote against the repression of marijuana for years,
pushing the topic beyond the counterculture. But the counterculture --
at least the marijuana side if it -- has gone bourgeois, and Dolezal
has moved on to other issues, such as protecting endangered species
and ranting against the caviar trade and the concept of "intelligent
design," which he thinks is a factor in keeping the United States out
of the "group of civilized countries."

But marijuana is never far from his thoughts. He inhales. He picks up
a plant bud and a magnifying glass. "Look at this," he says. He pulls
a green sprig from above the door. Forlorn and shriveled, it's a plant
from another era, before hydro-planting, chemical manipulation and
meticulous cultivation.

"This is what we grew during the Bolshevik times," he says. "It's a
typical ganja plant. These days we use it only for decoration."