FROM REVOLUTIONARY WEED TO A BOURGEOIS INDULGENCE

Friendly Exchanges of Marijuana Among Connoisseurs Become a Fixture Of
Post-Communist Life in Czech Republic

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.

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 age 15 to 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 is not
a crime to possess "no amount larger than a small amount," according
to the statute.

Lively Debate

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."

Marijuana and other drugs weren't widespread during the Cold War. The
communist regime considered marijuana 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 Habsburgs 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.

Not for Tourists

A raconteur with a cantankerous side, Dolezal doesn't want a bunch of
stoned, goofy-faced tourists roaming around the castles and falling
into the Vltava River. Despite his entreaties, dealers whisper in
alleys at night, selling a gram of this, a bag of that to Russians,
Britons 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."

Mravcik estimates 12 tons of marijuana is smoked each year in this
country of 10.2 million. Prevalence among young people has doubled
since 1995.

"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."

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.