DUTCH HOST HASH BASH

30 Years Of Legal Marijuana

HAARLEM, Netherlands -- The water pipe stood two metres tall, encircled by
people puffing on its 64 mouthpieces.

Elsewhere in the room, a new machine rolled out 300 marijuana joints in
minutes. Free hash was passed around.

It was the start of a three-day Hash and Weed Festival on Friday evening.
The aging pioneers of the Dutch marijuana culture, watched by hundreds of
young aficionados, gathered in a gymnasium to mark the 30th anniversary of
the first "coffee shop" that openly sold reefers like cups of coffee.

"This celebration honours the world's most successful marijuana experiment:
the Dutch coffee shop system," said Pete Brady, an organizer and writer for
Cannabis Culture Magazine.

The seeds of Dutch drug tolerance were planted in 1969 when two
entrepreneurs with a taste for marijuana started selling cannabis plants
from a houseboat, calling themselves the Lowlands Weed company.

In 1972, Wernard Bruining opened Mellow Yellow -- then called a "tea house"
- -- on the Amstel River in Amsterdam, the Dutch capital that is now a Mecca
for marijuana smokers.

Progressive Drug Policies

The weekend festival was a tribute to three decades of progressive drug
policies in the Netherlands and to the men, like Bruining, who founded a
culture.

Another of the pioneers at Friday's celebration was (Old Ed) Holloway, now
86, a cannabis cultivator who moved to the Netherlands in the 1970s from
California. Holloway taught Dutch marijuana growers how to use genetic
plant breeding techniques that increased the potency and yield of their crops.