HERE AND THERE

Prohibition Gains Ground in Europe, Even As U.S. Legalization Fight Continues

The excellent reporting in these pages by my colleagues Larry Gabriel
and Curt Guyette has kept me up to date on the hope for a greener
future in Michigan by means of the marijuana legalization initiative.
I'm far away from home this month, trying to make sense of the
repressive measures presently being championed and soon to be
implemented by the Dutch government.

It'd be a beautiful thing if some of the rich people who back these
petition drives - or even some of the millionaires among us who've
never backed one before - would cough up some funds to help Matt Abel
and the organizers of the citizens initiative take their battle
against the forces of evil in this issue over the top this year in Michigan.

Whether or not someone gallops to the financial rescue of the
struggle to end marijuana prohibition in 2012, however, it's
essential to remember that the issue will finally be decided not by
money but by the majority of the citizens who support legalization
and will sign the petition and go to the polls and cast their votes
against prohibition once and for all.

Almost two-thirds of the voting population of Michigan favored the
legalization of medical marijuana four years ago. Now there's a
bigger political base than ever in support of the issue, starting
with the 131,308 patient registrants certified by the state of
Michigan by the end of 2011.

Even those medical marijuana patients who have little sympathy for
recreational use per se will surely perceive the essential fact that
the best way to get the police and the state's attorney general out
of their medical affairs is to get them out of the marijuana world altogether.

Once legalization is effected and marijuana prohibition joins alcohol
prohibition on the fetid dust heap of history, anyone who uses
marijuana for any reason will be free from state intervention in
their personal lives - on that issue, at least.

Americans have been so brainwashed about weed by the authorities that
have profited so immeasurably from marijuana prohibition for so long
that it's hard to grasp the immensity of the change in the life of
the marijuana smoker when the police are no longer authorized to
interfere with his or her activity - recreational, medicinal or otherwise.

The first time I came to Amsterdam for the 1998 Cannabis Cup, I
remained whacked out of my gourd for every waking minute of an entire
week. As the High Priest of the Cannabis Cup, I was gifted with
enormous quantities of the best weed I'd ever smoked, and I felt it
was incumbent on me to ingest each of the 42 strains of indica and
sativa entered into the competition that year. So I did - no problem.

After a couple days of this exhilarating existence, I began to notice
that my shoulders seemed to be lowering and my anxiety levels rapidly
diminishing. Of course, some of this may be attributable to the
medicinal effect of the weed itself, but even more so it was the
gradual realization that I would not be accosted by the local
authorities and treated as a criminal while I was in Holland.

When I first started smoking weed 50 years ago in the north end of
Flint, I was taught extreme caution by my mentors when venturing into
the outside world. They would roll up two joints and wrap them in a
paper tissue and carry them in their hand for sudden disposal at any
sign of police interference. There weren't so many people who smoked
weed then, and we were fairly easy to spot.

Ever since then, I've spent my life carefully guarding my stash and
devising effective means of transporting it from place to place in
the course of daily life. I had some problems involving sharing the
sacrament with strangers for a few years, but I've been "clean" with
the law on this issue since late in 1971. And now that I'm a medical
marijuana patient registered with the state of Michigan, I don't feel
quite so threatened in my regular activities.

Still, there's that cloud of oppression that always hovers overhead,
and the person with you may well not suffer from medical conditions
that qualify him or her as a marijuana patient exempt from search,
seizure and arrest.

Further, as in the case of our state's leading law enforcement
officer, perhaps the copper in question does not adhere to the
Michigan Medical Marihuana Act in its fullness and decides to ignore
my own medical qualifications to give me some grief for having my
medicine in my pocket.

The dread question, "Where'd ya get it?" is no longer pertinent,
since my caregiver's name and address are listed on the back of my
card, but there could likely be some sort of irregularity the copper
may wish to pursue and then I'm back in the shit again.

There's been nothing like this in Holland for about four decades -
ever since personal use of recreational drugs was removed from the
criminal ledger and hundreds of coffee shops selling, serving and
providing for the smoking of marijuana on the premises were allowed
to insinuate themselves into the Dutch social order.

The coffee shop scene went basically unregulated until the mid-1990s,
when the government decided that it was time to institute a system of
oversight and control to rein in the unbridled growth of the cannabis industry.

First the purveyors of cannabis across the counter were required to
register with local authorities and apply for a license to continue
operating. They were made subject to taxation on their profits, and
their employees were brought into the official employment scheme.

Since cannabis remained illegal per se under the existing drug laws,
the world of recreational use and commerce was considered a "gray
area" that was allowed to exist without legal sanction through the
grace of the queen and her government.

But now, as decriminalization and outright legalization of marijuana
continue to gain significant numbers of supporters in America and the
Western world, the current right-wing government of the Netherlands
has for some reason decided that cannabis is bad and "drug tourism"
is even worse.

In the past few years since the ascension of the current political
ruling coalition (within which the "anti-Islam" party is a driving
force), the Dutch government and Parliament have dropped all pretense
of reasonableness - sort of like the Republican majority in the U.S.
House of Representatives - and begun to attack the cannabis culture
as morally questionable and quite possibly a source of social degeneration.

Particularly scurrilous in their view are the people who come to
Holland from other countries around the world to partake in the
openness, convenience and relative social freedom of the coffee shop
culture in Amsterdam, or those from neighboring EU states such as
Germany, France, Belgium and the UK, who come to Holland to cop and
take their purchases back home with them.

I had meant to report here on several revolting developments now
under way in The Netherlands but got carried away thinking of how
great it would be to legalize marijuana in Michigan in 2012. Now I've
come to the end of my space and time for this installment so, as my
editor frequently says, stay out there, and I'll add, help end
marijuana prohibition.

- -Amsterdam

Jan. 13, 2012