cannabisnews.com: Going To Pot 





Going To Pot 
Posted by FoM on November 19, 2001 at 07:54:10 PT
By Patrick Barkham
Source: Guardian Unlimited
A group of young lads hang around the entrance to Rainbow Lane, a leafy little alley off Nimbin's main street. "Buds matey," one calls out. "Bush skunk," says another. The dealers scurry down the alley with a customer to swap a generous bag of fresh weed for a roll of notes. This tiny town of several thousand people in a lush valley in northern New South Wales is the unlikely cannabis capital of a country that has a higher proportion of marijuana consumers than any western nation. 
"Schoolkids knock off for an hour at lunch and make a few hundred bucks," says Chicken George, a local man sitting in the Rainbow Cafe. Michael Balderstone, another Nimbin resident and president of the Help End Marijuana Prohibition (Hemp) party, estimates that dealers pocket A$3.5m (£1.25m) a year in the lane alone. Nimbin has had a long love affair with soft drugs and alternative lifestyles, but pot now seems to cause more pain than pleasure. Locals feel imprisoned by aggressive dealing on their main street, the brazen face of the town's busy drug trade. "The whole town is held to ransom by 20 people," says Lisa Yeates, who has lived in Nimbin for more than two decades. But residents also say they feel trapped by the heavy-handed tactics of local police, who are forced to toe the government's "war on drugs" line, and brutalised by the media, who have dubbed Nimbin a "heroin hellhole". After the staging of the Aquarius festival, a Glastonbury-style event, in 1973, many of the visiting hippies fell in love with the region and stayed, turning derelict dairy farms into thriving communes. More than 40 "communities" still exist in the region today. Anything grows in Nimbin's lush, subtropical climate and the hippies have been able to cultivate plentiful supplies of avocados, mangoes, potatoes - and pot. The town became a magnet for people seeking peace and love. Balderstone packed in his job as a London-based stockbroker, travelled the world and pitched up in Nimbin.Ms Yeates divorced her husband - an ex-federal narcotics officer - and drove to the town in a VW Kombi. "I was one of the lucky ones who experienced it when it really was velvets, music and rainbows," she says. "When it was simple." Things became complicated in the 1980s, when heroin entered Nimbin. Across the street from the young dealers lounge a group of older people in the town's tiny park. They are thin, scarred and toothless, testimony to years of heavy substance abuse. Soft drugs also grew into big business in the 1980s, as the temptation of easy money found its way into Nimbin's intimate valleys. There is plenty of demand: an Australian Institute of Health and Welfare survey found that 18% of Australians admitted to using soft drugs in the last 12 months, compared to just 9% of those surveyed in the US and Britain. In total, 39% of Australians admitted to taking marijuana at some point in their lives, more than any other developed country. Many also voted for it: the Hemp party received more than 60,000 votes in just two states in this month's election. Nimbin's street sellers also serve a booming tourist trade. "Here come the cows to be milked," comments Mr Balderstone wearily, as a busload of British backpackers, on an "alternative" tour from nearby Byron Bay, rolls up. The dealing is so open that many believe it is legal. One Japanese tourist was arrested after he showed his dope to local police, complaining he had been ripped off. Over the years, Nimbin's hippie communes have campaigned against and changed a raft of laws, from regulations on the multiple occupancy of properties to midwifery laws. But when they attempted an innovative solution to the town's drug problem, it met with a police crackdown. Several cafes and businesses began selling fixed-price marijuana as part of a community attempt to eradicate the ugly street dealing. The pot was locally grown, organic, all proceeds went back into the community, and it was sold to over-18s only, says Gerald Taylor, the owner of the Rainbow Cafe. The cafes became very popular, particularly with visiting backpackers, adds Taylor, an Irishman with an impish grin. According to Robin Archbold, the local chamber of commerce president whose estate agent business is close to Rainbow Lane, street dealing noticeably subsided. The dealers weren't happy about losing business and bricks were hurled through the windows of the cafe and the Hemp Embassy, a gift-shop and campaign centre for legalisation activists. The police weren't impressed either, shutting down the cafes' off-street selling with a high-profile raid. Legal proceedings are still continuing against the two staff caught serving pot to customers at the time. Locals accuse the police of abandoning day-to-day patrols of the area, instead periodically swooping in on big community raids rather than targeting aggressive individual dealers. "We get horrific police attention," says Ms Yeates. "But when we get community issues, such as fights, we can't get any help. They don't have time to walk up and down the street." An angry crowd of several hundred townsfolk hurled abuse at the police two weeks ago, when the Hemp Embassy was surrounded by 28 officers. Unsurprisingly, one activist, Dave Cannabis, was arrested - for possessing a small quantity of cannabis. Local area police commander Barry Audsley is well aware of the shortcomings of the "war on drugs". He says police do patrol Nimbin, but dealers are wise to them and are never caught with large quantities of drugs. Meanwhile, he must police the 68,354 square mile Nimbin region - an area the size of Scotland and Wales combined - with just 172 officers. "The traditional ways of dealing with [the drug problem] aren't working. I'm prepared to try anything," says Mr Audsley. But, as he points out, the police's hands are tied until politicians signal an end to the war on drugs. There is no end in sight. Instead, both residents and police are left puzzling over what Barry Audsley calls the "third generation" drug dealers, who saunter along Rainbow Lane, giving the town its bad name. "The new generation of kids out there are just a different breed of people to their parents and grandparents," says Mr Audsley. "They aren't growing cannabis for themselves or to help their mates out. They are doing it for profit. Their parents and grandparents didn't want electricity, or TVs or newspapers. They just wanted to run around with no clothes on." "We've got this little piece of New York," says Mr Balderstone, gesturing towards the dealers on Rainbow Lane. "They are alienated and criminalised and they listen to Chicago crack rap shit. It's heavy.""I am not on the dole, I am a professional dope grower," insists one dealer. Another, Lee, 23, wants to be a hip-hop artist, and sells drugs to buy records. "It's not the gangsta mentality here," he says. "We don't want to kill people. We're just criminals." For Michael Balderstone, the illegality of soft drugs is the root cause of Nimbin's problem. "Nothing has devastated the hippie dream like prohibition. Hippies don't have guns but the cannabis culture has attracted all sorts of people who are in it for the money. Love and trust have to go together and the trust thing has had the shit kicked out of it with prohibition." But the picturesque town, still full of idealism but blighted by drugs, is not some kind of hippie idyll turned sour, says Benny Zable, an artist and environmental activist who attended the first festival in 1973 and painted many of the town's famous main street murals. "The drug problem is played up in the media but it's a real distortion of what Nimbin is about," he says. "It was a place for people to try out their dreams and aspirations for a new world rising and it still is. We hope it will evolve into a place where people carry on coming to try out their ideas, where they couldn't normally, getting away from the authoritarian world." Note: Australia's hippie 'cannabis capital', Nimbin, is as much about police and drugs as it is about peace and love, writes Patrick Barkham.Source: Guardian Unlimited, The (UK)Author: Patrick BarkhamPublished: Monday, November 19, 2001Copyright: 2001 Guardian Newspapers LimitedContact: letters guardian.co.ukWebsite: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Nimbin Online http://www.nimbin.org/CannabisNews - Cannabis Archiveshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/list/cannabis.shtml
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