DUTCH "STATE POT" IS NO HEADY STUFF FOR OFFICIAL SUPPLIER

ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (AFP) - If pot is officially good for you in the
Netherlands, it is proving even better for James Burton, a US citizen whose
once semi-clandestine business grew to become one the Dutch health
service's two official providers of medical cannabis.

Not that Burton, 56, started out as a freewheeling child of the hippie era,
quite the contrary. He first took to cannabis not on a rebellious campus,
but serving in the Vietnam war. "It helped us to get on," he recalled.

Back in the US he took pot because he had no alternative to help relieve
the nastier effects of glaucoma, a condition where persistent high blood
pressure in the eyeball ends up causing blindness.

He grew cannabis for his own consumption only and took the drug under
medical control.

Today his greenhouses outside the port city of Rotterdam, western
Netherlands, produce the cannabis that is now available on prescription to
Dutch patients with serious or disabling conditions.

His and the other supplier's production is known in the Dutch press as
"state pot", to differentiate it from the presumably more dubious cannabis
on sale in the country's infamous "coffee shops".

In 1990 Burton moved to the Netherlands, a country where a robust sense of
civil liberties supports more relaxed, offbeat types of behaviour.

"I began growing small quantities at the request of doctors" in 1990," he
said. But that was still semi-clandestine.

Today the former computer technician looks even less like the flower child
he never was. With his small, gold-rimmed spectacles, immaculate white
apron and surgeon gloves, he rather looks like a mortician.

And yet life springs around him in the form of tiny green sprigs that take
four months to grow and another two to reach the degree of humidity where
they are ripe for the cropping.

Far from being wild or disorderly, this is very much a well-controlled
operation -- despite the overwhelming stench of hemp.

Each one of the 2,500 plants in the greenhouse carries its own number, in
order to keep the crop under tight surveillance. Computerisation also helps
maintain the degree of moisture which in turn will make sure that each
10-kilogramme (20-pound) crop of cannabis flower will deliver a constant
amount of THC, the pain-killing constituent in cannabis.

To Burton, quality is essential. "The stuff will go to Dutch pharmacists
and to universities, but some of it is also to be exported to research
laboratories in Canada and even the United States," said the president for
the Dutch Foundation for medical cannabis.

This is somewhat ironical, as the anti-drug strictures of the Reagan
administration in the late 1980s sent Burton to prison for a year.

To Burton, his status as pot supplier to the government comes not just as a
revenge, but also as the culmination of many years' dedicated research into
the pain-killing virtues of cannabis.

When he first came to Holland, he stayed at a campsite as he could not
afford rent a home. His only wealth was his reputation both as an expert
grower and a medical user of the herb.

Dutch doctors were keen to make the most of his rich experience and soon
enough together they took to monitoring as many as 1,500 patients,
detailing the type of pot that was best for any given condition. Burton
went on to publish a treatise on pot growing.

His efforts of a decade were finally rewarded in October 2001. That was
when the Dutch government decided to legalise cannabis and asked him to
become one of the two official suppliers.

For Burton the grass was definitely greener this side of the Atlantic. But
he decried Amsterdam's all-too famous coffee shops, where the drug has
become legally available, as they give cannabis the wrong sort of reputation.

As for any negative side-effects -- loss of control, risk of pyschological
dependence -- Burton is prompt to minimise them as less pronounced than
those of classical pain-killers such as morphine or valium.

So Burton does take his role as a state pot grower very seriously indeed.
But then, as he remarked: "Without cannabis, today I'd be blind."