BLOWING DUTCH

Vancouverites were highly visible at Amsterdam's Cannabis Cup, and
sometimes visibly high. But, writes Brian Preston, important stuff
happened too.

On the eve of the 13th Annual High Times Cannabis Cup, which wrapped
two weeks ago in Amsterdam, I shared a table with an English couple
named Robbie and Anne Marie, at a coffee shop called Rookies. They
were "skinning up," as the English like to say - rolling tobacco and
marijuana (in this case a strain called Northern Lights) into big,
three-paper joints. Smoking cannabis is illegal in Britain, of
course, but the seeds are legal, and can be bought in any fish-bait
shop. Robbie explained why: Not long after the Second World War some
Frenchmen came over to compete in a famous British fishing derby. The
French brought hemp seeds, which they boiled until soft, then attached
to hooks. British fish went crazy for cannabis, and the Frenchmen won
the derby. "So hemp seeds were legalized in Britain," said Robbie.

"To beat the French," added Anne Marie.

The two Londoners had crossed the channel for the Cannabis Cup, which
bills itself as "the world's leading convention for marijuana lovers
and connoisseurs." It's a huge party in which 2,000 tourists, most of
them American readers of High Times magazine, race around Amsterdam,
visiting 19 competing coffee shops, getting their "official judge's
passports" (cost $200 U.S.) stamped. As judges they appraise the
ambience of each shop, while smoking and rating the unique strains of
cannabis on offer.

Robbie and Anne Marie were back for the second straight year. "I'd
never thought fondly of the Yanks before," said Robbie. "But, last
year I found out there are no typical Americans. We met young black
kids from Los Angeles, 60-year-old Mohawk Indians from the Bronx,
college professors from Kansas, retired couples from Florida. It made
me realize America is just an amazing multiplicity of sub-groups.
Small tribes."

"And all the accents are so-o-o-o different," said Anne
Marie.

By the next afternoon I understood what they meant, Cannabis Cup
central was the Pax Party House, a three-storey convention space right
next to a police station on Ferdinand Bolstraat. The Pax was packed
with every kind of American male; there were young homeys moving in
small posses, decked out head to toe in Oakland Raider silver and
black; there were balding tie-dyed hippies, and African-American
yuppies with salon-styled dreads; and there were pleanty of small-town
guys with curved-billed ballcaps, looking like they just got off work
at the feedmill. I asked one from Tennessee how the police treat pot
smokers in his home state. "If you don't have a lot, they sprinkle it
on the ground," he said. "But if you have a lot, they crucify you to
the cross."

It's hard to imagine the Dutch wanting to crucify anyone. Amsterdam
has become the centre of world cannabis culture because the Dutch
practice an Old World pragmatism that often gets labelled "tolerance,"
and because the American War on Drugs has driven American cannabis
experts into exile there. "The Dutch were the first country to
abolish slavery," one such ex-pat philosophized in a coffee shop.
"But they were also the first to use slavery, before that. They
invented the slave plantation, in Sumatra. So they're always ahead of
the curve. They're always inventing some new thing 50 years ahead of
everyone else. Fifty years from now more of the world will be like
Holland, and Holland will be on to something completely new." In
support of his theory, the Dutch parliament was busy that week
preparing to make their country the world's first to give legal
sanction to euthanasia.

Canada and B.C. if not quite in Holland's league, are certainly
players in the world of marijuana. This year a Canadian seed company,
Legends, managed a third place finish with a sativa strain it had
grown outdoors in Switzerland. Marc Emery, Vancouver's high-profile
pot impresario, did not attend, avoiding the wrath of several Dutch
seed company owners, who are angry with him for retailing their
products without their permission on the Internet. Reporters from
Emery's Cannabis Culture magazine were refused press credentials
because of a running feud with High Times. But there were plenty of
Vancouver pot snobs on hand, grudgingly admitting that the Dutch are
growing better, cleaner bud. In years past, the locals had grumbled
about the Europeans using too many chemical fertilizers, which apart
from possible health concerns, made a joint burn poorly. I met
Canadians from four other provinces as well. One foursome of Calgary
hosers sported specially made Olympic-style red and white athletic
jackets with "Canadian Smoking Team" emblazoned across their backs.
Another couple had arrived straight from a similar competition in
Montreal. "There were 800 people in a rented hall," one said. "They
gave you 11 varieties at the door. The smoke was so thick you
couldn't even see the reggae band on the stage."

Last year's Cannabis Cup was marred by charges of fixes and ballot
stuffing. "Fraud at the Cannabis Cup" was played up with great
amusement in the Dutch media. What had begun a dozen years earlier as
a harvest festival with hippie ideals had mutated into cutthroat
capitalist competition between coffee shops. This year the organizers
went out of their way to keep it clean. The theme was "Honour the
Goddess" and so cannabis goddesses - female marijuana activists,
mostly -- were flown in to be feted, to give seminars and to smoke
lots of pot as esteemed judges.

Vancouver's Watermelon, named for the fruit she sells (along with her
special recipe "krazy kannabis kookies") in the nude on Wreck Beach, had
been hired as official SpokesGoddess. Watermelon is also a stand-up comic
with a Norm McDonald deadpan style, and it was her duty to MC the evening
entertainments at the famous Melkweg, introducing such acts as Patti Smith
and Starship, the remnants (no Grace Slick) of Jefferson Airplane. She took
her job seriously, and wore classy gowns all week in a deliberate decision
to dress and behave like the kind of spokesmodel who would do any straight
cause proud. "I've been to pot legalization rallies in Vancouver where
everyone is dressed like a delinquent," said the 27-year-old. "Pot
activists are never going to get taken seriously until we show that we
represent the hundreds of thousands of average users, who are mostly white
and blue-collar regular folks."

Also on hand were Hilary Black and Jill Fanthorpe of Vancouver's
Compassion Club. Hilary took part in a seminar on medical marijuana
and gave a history of the club that was exceptionally lucid,
considering that as a "celebrity Godess judge" in the hashish
category, she was required to smoke a mountain - 17 different
varieties - of high-quality hash.

At her seminar Black began by describing how five years ago she worked
for Emery's Hemp B.C. store, and found herself constantly fielding
calls from people wanting to know about marijuana's purported value in
alleviating chronic pain. So she educated herself. In one case she
went to the house of an elderly woman with painful arthritis. After
they smoked a joint together the woman was able to go the kitchen make
herself a cup of the tea and carry it back to the living room, which
doesn't sound like a huge accomplishment, except it was the first time
in two years the woman had been able to pull it off. "She thought I
was some angel sent to her by God," Black told a packed conference
room. "And as an 18-year-old girl, I knew I had found a calling."

Now the Compassion Club has 1,200 patients, offers all kinds of free
alternative therapies like Reiki and acupuncture, and is a registered
charity. The audience, mostly Americanns living under Zero Tolerance,
applauded when Black told them how a huge Vancouver police officer,
after touring the club, had put a paternal hand on her shoulder and
said, "You girls are doing good Christian work here."

Standing in the doorway of the police station beside the Pax,
Fanthorpe, the club's chief cannabis buyer, was explaining to a
journalist her methodology as a Cannabis Cup hashish judge when two
cops came racing out of the station, threaded their way through the
multitude of potheads, hopped into a car, and sped away. It reminded
me of the scene a few years ago when the Vancouver police raided Hemp
B.C., and the crowd outside chanted, "Don't waste our time, go fight
real crime!" Amsterdam cops seem to get it right at least for the
consumer. But the coffee shops still operate in a legal limbo that
the Dutch call "front door legal, back door illegal," meaning they can
sell pot in tiny amounts at the front counter, but buying it in bulk
and bringing it in the back still gets you busted. It's a situation
not so different from that faced by the Compassion Club in Vancouver .
The police ignore the dispensing of pot to the sick, but still charge
anyone they catch growing it.

Another honoured Goddess was California-based Mikki Norris, co-author
of the book "Shattered Lives; Portraits from America's Drug War",
which highlights the absurd prison sentences American courts are
handing down to drug offenders. Norris gave a slide show of Drug War
victims like Melinda George, serving 99 years in Texas for the sale of
one tenth of a gram of cocaine. An audience member yelled out,
"George W. Bush never did a line in his life smaller than that!"

Norris asked people to check out her Web site, potpride.com "because
we want to say, "We're here, we're high, get used to it!" She
suggested pot users need to follow the Gay Pride model. "Gays by
coming out of the closet made major gains in their rights, and we need
to do that. Because once they see who the pot smokers really are,
that we're middle-class responsible taxpayers mostly, I don't think
they're going to want to persecute us."

I was reminded of Vancouver's trepidation at the thought of a
"sodomite invasion before the Gay Games here a decade ago, and how the
city's attitude toward gay tourism was tansformed by that event.
Amsterdam accepts the Cannabis Cup participants for the same reasons
Vancouver and other cities now court gays - they are largely
well-behaved, affluent Americans discreetly and responsibly
celebrating a freedom they aren't allowed in many parts of the
so-called Land of the Free.

But coming out of the closet is still a huge risk for an American pot
smoker. There were some fairly obvious undercover agents mixing in
the crowd at the Cup, like the guy with the amateur video camera
pretending to tape the seminars but spending most of his time zooming
in one by one on the faces of audience members. All the brave
rhetoric about coming out didn't seem to be swaying him. He was just
following orders. What Norris called the "prison-industrial complex"
in America has a huge stake in keeping prison cells for two million
occupied, and docile pot smokers do make ideal prisoners.

The only Goddess who professed no interest in using cannabis herself
was Nancy Lord Johnson, a Nevada lawyer and MD who in 1992 ran for
U.S. vice-president on the Libertarian ticket. Lord Johnson delivered
a chilling speech that might have been called The Drug War and the
Erosion of American Liberty. "Kicking in your door and shooting your
dog, locking your kids in another room, this is done in the name of
getting the big bad drug dealer, and now they're starting to do it to
everybody," she said. She described the sad case of an alternative
therapist who had been administering liquid deprenyl citrate. "Anyone
know what liquid drprenyl is? It's an anti-Parkinson's drug. His
particlular version of it was not the FDA-approved version but it was
better. He had a patient getting sick on the approved drug, the only
thing that made her able to live her life and not be shaking was the
liquid deprenyl citrate he made available to her." Charged and
convicted of supplying the unapproved drug, the therapist got 13 years.

The highlight of the Cup was to be the induction of Ina May Gaskin
into something called the Counter-Cultural Hall of Fame. Gaskin is
the founding mother of the modern American midwifery movement, and
author of the bible of alternative childbirthing, Spiritual Midwifery.
At a mid-week press conference, she was introduced by her husband,
Stephen, who was fresh from a year spent trying to push marijuana
rights within Ralph Nader's Green Party. "Ralph thinks marijuana is
like a faulty windshield wiper," he said. "A consumer product that
could hurt you." But he said Nader had eventually come to respect his
view that what's happening to marijuana users in the United States is
"a massive civil-rights violation, on the level of a class war.
Because we're a random tribe, scattered and isolated, they exploit
that."

At a press conference, Ina May Gaskin related how, as a curious
bookworm in the 1950s, she had dug around libraries in Iowa trying to
find out more about "this mysterious plant" that her jazz-musician
heroes like Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane smoked. Beyond that she
had little to say about cannabis except that it had never done her any
harm; instead she talked about childbirth as an event most women still
need to reclaim. "It doesn't make sense to do surgery to cut a baby
out of a woman when there is a way the baby is meant to come out," she
said. Why do doctors push for caesareans? "It seems the problem is
really fear of women's sexuality, and women's creative power, and it's
time to get over it," she informed a rapt audience that included punk
diva Patti Smith, who later spoke glowingly of the role Gaskin's book
had played in the birth of her own children.

Gaskin approaches birth as a sensual experience, using such touch
techniques as stimulation of the nipples and kissing to harness the
passions of arousal to bring forth life. "A woman can orgasm during
childbirth, and most doctors don't want you to know it," she said, at
which point a woman in the audience, unable to contain herself,
interrupted to say that in 1979 while giving birth to her second
child. "I told my doctor, I think I'm having an orgasm, and he told
me I was crazy."

That was the press conference. On the final night of the Cup, at the
big party at the Melkweg, it was a harder sell getting the rowdy,
mostly male, party crowd to pay attention to a lengthy introduction of
Gaskin, featuring slides of breach births and such food for thought as
"lying on her back is the worst possible position for a woman giving
birth." The crowd was more interested in who was going to win the
People's Cup (Barney's Breakfast Bar), or Best Coffeeshop (De
Rokerij). Hilary Black announced the winner for best hashish (the
Water Hash from Katsu), telling the crowd, "I look forward to the day
when high quality hashish is available all over the world."

Actually, for do-it-yourselfers it already is: Earlier in the evening,
Goddess Mila Jansen, a Dutch pot entrepreneur who invented the
Ice-olater, a simple system to make hashish from cannabis leaves and
flowers, announced her product is now used in 37 countries. While
America keeps locking people away, the rest of the world is coming out
to play.