cannabisnews.com: Prague's Party Is Over 





Prague's Party Is Over 
Posted by FoM on October 27, 1999 at 09:09:06 PT
New laws change the mood of an old hippie haven
Source: Newsweek
Ever since the 1989 Velvet Revolution, Prague has been renowned across Europe as a party town. The aroma of marijuana smoke wafts through the parks along the Vlasta River, and the Czech capital's popular rave clubs draw thousands of young revelers, many wired on ecstasy. 
Police rarely hassle pot smokers, and the only cannabis-related jail sentence in the last decade was given to a dealer busted for cultivating two hectares of pot in a forest near Prague. "One of the great things about living in Prague has been its 'live and let live' atmosphere," says Dan Levine, an American expatriate who writes and edits the Avant-Guide travel-book series.But the high times in Prague may soon be over. Last January in the wake of a growing backlash against Prague's permissiveness, the Czech government enacted its first anti-drug laws since the country separated from the Slovak Republic in 1992. The new legislation, which passed over President Vaclav Havel's veto, is intended to align the Czech Republic's drug laws with those of other European nations and makes even simple possession of marijuana illegal. Most controversially, the law also imposes a two- to five-year sentence for carrying more than a "small amount" of any narcotic substance. The Prague Post, an English-language weekly, captured the new mood in a front-page headline: LAST STAND FOR 'AMSTERDAM EAST?'Prague's status as a drug haven is a recent phenomenon. During the communist era, the only drugs available on the underground market were airplane glue or home-brewed narcotics. Western-style drugs were so rare that marijuana could be consumed in the open. "We smoked pot publicly in the cafes," says Jiri Dolazel, a pot-legalization advocate and journalist. "Nobody knew what it was. We told them we were smoking 'aromatic cigarettes from the West'."All that changed in December 1989. The fall of communism ended Czechoslovakia's isolation and attracted a stream of young expatriates from the United States and Western Europe. Prague quickly became one of Europe's most drug-friendly capitals, thanks to a dearth of anti-drug laws and an atmosphere of tolerance fostered by former dissidents who assumed key positions in the government. But by the mid- 1990s, the Czech Republic was also becoming both a key transit point and the final destination for hard drugs, especially heroin. A 1995 Dutch study listed Prague as having one of the highest incidences of intravenous drug use in Europe. In March 1999 Czech police broke up one of Europe's largest drug rings—a Prague-based Kosovar-Albanian gang that controlled 90 percent of heroin distribution into Scandinavia.Last year, with crime rising and many ordinary Czechs sickened by the country's drug-tolerant image, the anti-drug backlash set in. Jiri Vacek, the hard-line police chief of the town of Liberec, launched a crusade to make all drugs illegal—and the movement took off in other towns. Leaders of the right-wing Christian Democrats joined communists to introduce tough legislation in Parliament. Havel and other liberals blasted the legislation as a "bad law" and the pot lobby joined in the battle. The People Working for Hemp, a group cofounded by Dolazel, published the home address of a hard-line anti-drug Christian Democrat—whose house was inundated with a mass mailing of 200 joints. Even so, the law passed by a wide margin.So far, the atmosphere in Prague hasn't changed much. People still smoke pot in the city's parks, and at the Drop-In Center just off Wenceslas Square—the city's only needle-exchange program—director Dr. Jiri Presl says few of his clients have been scared off. Still, there are signs of a chill. Sitting in the Cafe Slavia by the Vlasta River, the site of his communist-era smokeouts, Dolazel leafs through a diary that chronicles the creeping crackdown. The latest arrest: a high-school girl given a nine-month suspended sentence and two years' probation for possession of a cannabis plant. "For 10 years we've been able to stave off repression," says Dolazel. "But maybe now we've lost the battle." They can take heart in one fact, at least: Amsterdam is still just a 90-minute flight away.By Joshua HammerNewsweek InternationalNovember 1, 1999 © 1999 Newsweek, Inc. 
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Comment #1 posted by kaptinemo on October 27, 1999 at 16:04:03 PT
Old habits die hard...
It never fails. People win their freedoms...and then they pawn them for a false sense of security engendered in "get tough" laws against behaviors a voacl minority don't like.Just like here, in the US; creeping totalitarianism is endemic.
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