PRAGUE'S PARTY IS OVER

Ever since the 1989 Velvet Revolution, Prague has been renowned
across Europe as a party town. The aroma of marijuana smoke wafts
through the parks along the Vlasta River, and the Czech capital's
popular rave clubs draw thousands of young revelers, many wired on
ecstasy.

Police rarely hassle pot smokers, and the only cannabis-related jail
sentence in the last decade was given to a dealer busted for
cultivating two hectares of pot in a forest near Prague. "One of the
great things about living in Prague has been its 'live and let live'
atmosphere," says Dan Levine, an American expatriate who writes and
edits the Avant-Guide travel-book series. But the high times in Prague
may soon be over. Last January in the wake of a growing backlash
against Prague's permissiveness, the Czech government enacted its
first anti-drug laws since the country separated from the Slovak
Republic in 1992. The new legislation, which passed over President
Vaclav Havel's veto, is intended to align the Czech Republic's drug
laws with those of other European nations and makes even simple
possession of marijuana illegal. Most controversially, the law also
imposes a two-to five-year sentence for carrying more than a "small
amount" of any narcotic substance. The Prague Post, an
English-language weekly, captured the new mood in a front-page
headline: LAST STAND FOR 'AMSTERDAM EAST?'

Prague's status as a drug haven is a recent phenomenon. During the
communist era, the only drugs available on the underground market were
airplane glue or home-brewed narcotics. Western-style drugs were so
rare that marijuana could be consumed in the open. "We smoked pot
publicly in the cafes," says Jiri Dolazel, a pot-legalization advocate
and journalist. "Nobody knew what it was. We told them we were smoking
'aromatic cigarettes from the West'."

All that changed in December 1989. The fall of communism ended
Czechoslovakia's isolation and attracted a stream of young expatriates
from the United States and Western Europe. Prague quickly became one
of Europe's most drug-friendly capitals, thanks to a dearth of
anti-drug laws and an atmosphere of tolerance fostered by former
dissidents who assumed key positions in the government. But by the
mid- 1990s, the Czech Republic was also becoming both a key transit
point and the final destination for hard drugs, especially heroin. A
1995 Dutch study listed Prague as having one of the highest incidences
of intravenous drug use in Europe. In March 1999 Czech police broke up
one of Europe's largest drug rings--a Prague-based Kosovar-Albanian
gang that controlled 90 percent of heroin distribution into
Scandinavia.

Last year, with crime rising and many ordinary Czechs sickened by the
country's drug-tolerant image, the anti-drug backlash set in. Jiri
Vacek, the hard-line police chief of the town of Liberec, launched a
crusade to make all drugs illegal--and the movement took off in other
towns. Leaders of the right-wing Christian Democrats joined communists
to introduce tough legislation in Parliament. Havel and other liberals
blasted the legislation as a "bad law" and the pot lobby joined in the
battle. The People Working for Hemp, a group cofounded by Dolazel,
published the home address of a hard-line anti-drug Christian
Democrat--whose house was inundated with a mass mailing of 200 joints.
Even so, the law passed by a wide margin.

So far, the atmosphere in Prague hasn't changed much. People still
smoke pot in the city's parks, and at the Drop-In Center just off
Wenceslas Square--the city's only needle-exchange program--director
Dr. Jiri Presl says few of his clients have been scared off. Still,
there are signs of a chill. Sitting in the Cafe Slavia by the Vlasta
River, the site of his communist-era smokeouts, Dolazel leafs through
a diary that chronicles the creeping crackdown. The latest arrest: a
high-school girl given a nine-month suspended sentence and two years'
probation for possession of a cannabis plant. "For 10 years we've been
able to stave off repression," says Dolazel. "But maybe now we've lost
the battle." They can take heart in one fact, at least: Amsterdam is
still just a 90-minute flight away.