cannabisnews.com: Blowing Dutch Blowing Dutch Posted by FoM on December 12, 2000 at 06:54:35 PT By Brian Preston Source: Vancouver Sun On the eve of the 13th Annual High Times Cannabis Cup, which wrapped two weeks ago in Amsterdam, I shared a table with an English couple named Robbie and Anne Marie, at a coffee shop called Rookies. They were "skinning up," as the English like to say - rolling tobacco and marijuana (in this case a strain called Northern Lights) into big, three-paper joints. Smoking cannabis is illegal in Britain, of course, but the seeds are legal, and can be bought in any fish-bait shop. Robbie explained why: Not long after the Second World War some Frenchmen came over to compete in a famous British fishing derby. The French brought hemp seeds, which they boiled until soft, then attached to hooks. British fish went crazy for cannabis, and the Frenchmen won the derby. "So hemp seeds were legalized in Britain," said Robbie."To beat the French," added Anne Marie.The two Londoners had crossed the channel for the Cannabis Cup, which bills itself as "the world's leading convention for marijuana lovers and connoisseurs." It's a huge party in which 2,000 tourists, most of them American readers of High Times magazine, race around Amsterdam, visiting 19 competing coffee shops, getting their "official judge's passports" (cost $200 U.S.) stamped. As judges they appraise the ambience of each shop, while smoking and rating the unique strains of cannabis on offer.Robbie and Anne Marie were back for the second straight year. "I'd never thought fondly of the Yanks before," said Robbie. "But, last year I found out there are no typical Americans. We met young black kids from Los Angeles, 60-year-old Mohawk Indians from the Bronx, college professors from Kansas, retired couples from Florida. It made me realize America is just an amazing multiplicity of sub-groups. Small tribes.""And all the accents are so-o-o-o different," said Anne Marie.By the next afternoon I understood what they meant, Cannabis Cup central was the Pax Party House, a three-storey convention space right next to a police station on Ferdinand Bolstraat. The Pax was packed with every kind of American male; there were young homeys moving in small posses, decked out head to toe in Oakland Raider silver and black; there were balding tie-dyed hippies, and African-American yuppies with salon-styled dreads; and there were pleanty of small-town guys with curved-billed ballcaps, looking like they just got off work at the feedmill. I asked one from Tennessee how the police treat pot smokers in his home state. "If you don't have a lot, they sprinkle it on the ground," he said. "But if you have a lot, they crucify you to the cross."It's hard to imagine the Dutch wanting to crucify anyone. Amsterdam has become the centre of world cannabis culture because the Dutch practice an Old World pragmatism that often gets labelled "tolerance," and because the American War on Drugs has driven American cannabis experts into exile there. "The Dutch were the first country to abolish slavery," one such ex-pat philosophized in a coffee shop. "But they were also the first to use slavery, before that. They invented the slave plantation, in Sumatra. So they're always ahead of the curve. They're always inventing some new thing 50 years ahead of everyone else. Fifty years from now more of the world will be like Holland, and Holland will be on to something completely new." In support of his theory, the Dutch parliament was busy that week preparing to make their country the world's first to give legal sanction to euthanasia.Canada and B.C. if not quite in Holland's league, are certainly players in the world of marijuana. This year a Canadian seed company, Legends, managed a third place finish with a sativa strain it had grown outdoors in Switzerland. Marc Emery, Vancouver's high-profile pot impresario, did not attend, avoiding the wrath of several Dutch seed company owners, who are angry with him for retailing their products without their permission on the Internet. Reporters from Emery's Cannabis Culture magazine were refused press credentials because of a running feud with High Times. But there were plenty of Vancouver pot snobs on hand, grudgingly admitting that the Dutch are growing better, cleaner bud. In years past, the locals had grumbled about the Europeans using too many chemical fertilizers, which apart from possible health concerns, made a joint burn poorly. I met Canadians from four other provinces as well. One foursome of Calgary hosers sported specially made Olympic-style red and white athletic jackets with "Canadian Smoking Team" emblazoned across their backs. Another couple had arrived straight from a similar competition in Montreal. "There were 800 people in a rented hall," one said. "They gave you 11 varieties at the door. The smoke was so thick you couldn't even see the reggae band on the stage."Last year's Cannabis Cup was marred by charges of fixes and ballot stuffing. "Fraud at the Cannabis Cup" was played up with great amusement in the Dutch media. What had begun a dozen years earlier as a harvest festival with hippie ideals had mutated into cutthroat capitalist competition between coffee shops. This year the organizers went out of their way to keep it clean. The theme was "Honour the Goddess" and so cannabis goddesses - female marijuana activists, mostly -- were flown in to be feted, to give seminars and to smoke lots of pot as esteemed judges.Vancouver's Watermelon, named for the fruit she sells (along with her special recipe "krazy kannabis kookies") in the nude on Wreck Beach, had been hired as official SpokesGoddess. Watermelon is also a stand-up comic with a Norm McDonald deadpan style, and it was her duty to MC the evening entertainments at the famous Melkweg, introducing such acts as Patti Smith and Starship, the remnants (no Grace Slick) of Jefferson Airplane. She took her job seriously, and wore classy gowns all week in a deliberate decision to dress and behave like the kind of spokesmodel who would do any straight cause proud. "I've been to pot legalization rallies in Vancouver where everyone is dressed like a delinquent," said the 27-year-old. "Pot activists are never going to get taken seriously until we show that we represent the hundreds of thousands of average users, who are mostly white and blue-collar regular folks."Also on hand were Hilary Black and Jill Fanthorpe of Vancouver's Compassion Club. Hilary took part in a seminar on medical marijuana and gave a history of the club that was exceptionally lucid, considering that as a "celebrity Godess judge" in the hashish category, she was required to smoke a mountain - 17 different varieties - of high-quality hash.At her seminar Black began by describing how five years ago she worked for Emery's Hemp B.C. store, and found herself constantly fielding calls from people wanting to know about marijuana's purported value in alleviating chronic pain. So she educated herself. In one case she went to the house of an elderly woman with painful arthritis. After they smoked a joint together the woman was able to go the kitchen make herself a cup of the tea and carry it back to the living room, which doesn't sound like a huge accomplishment, except it was the first time in two years the woman had been able to pull it off. "She thought I was some angel sent to her by God," Black told a packed conference room. "And as an 18-year-old girl, I knew I had found a calling."Now the Compassion Club has 1,200 patients, offers all kinds of free alternative therapies like Reiki and acupuncture, and is a registered charity. The audience, mostly Americanns living under Zero Tolerance, applauded when Black told them how a huge Vancouver police officer, after touring the club, had put a paternal hand on her shoulder and said, "You girls are doing good Christian work here."Standing in the doorway of the police station beside the Pax, Fanthorpe, the club's chief cannabis buyer, was explaining to a journalist her methodology as a Cannabis Cup hashish judge when two cops came racing out of the station, threaded their way through the multitude of potheads, hopped into a car, and sped away. It reminded me of the scene a few years ago when the Vancouver police raided Hemp B.C., and the crowd outside chanted, "Don't waste our time, go fight real crime!" Amsterdam cops seem to get it right at least for the consumer. But the coffee shops still operate in a legal limbo that the Dutch call "front door legal, back door illegal," meaning they can sell pot in tiny amounts at the front counter, but buying it in bulk and bringing it in the back still gets you busted. It's a situation not so different from that faced by the Compassion Club in Vancouver . The police ignore the dispensing of pot to the sick, but still charge anyone they catch growing it.Another honoured Goddess was California-based Mikki Norris, co-author of the book "Shattered Lives; Portraits from America's Drug War", which highlights the absurd prison sentences American courts are handing down to drug offenders. Norris gave a slide show of Drug War victims like Melinda George, serving 99 years in Texas for the sale of one tenth of a gram of cocaine. An audience member yelled out, "George W. Bush never did a line in his life smaller than that!"Norris asked people to check out her Web site, potpride.com "because we want to say, "We're here, we're high, get used to it!" She suggested pot users need to follow the Gay Pride model. "Gays by coming out of the closet made major gains in their rights, and we need to do that. Because once they see who the pot smokers really are, that we're middle-class responsible taxpayers mostly, I don't think they're going to want to persecute us."I was reminded of Vancouver's trepidation at the thought of a "sodomite invasion before the Gay Games here a decade ago, and how the city's attitude toward gay tourism was tansformed by that event. Amsterdam accepts the Cannabis Cup participants for the same reasons Vancouver and other cities now court gays - they are largely well-behaved, affluent Americans discreetly and responsibly celebrating a freedom they aren't allowed in many parts of the so-called Land of the Free.But coming out of the closet is still a huge risk for an American pot smoker. There were some fairly obvious undercover agents mixing in the crowd at the Cup, like the guy with the amateur video camera pretending to tape the seminars but spending most of his time zooming in one by one on the faces of audience members. All the brave rhetoric about coming out didn't seem to be swaying him. He was just following orders. What Norris called the "prison-industrial complex" in America has a huge stake in keeping prison cells for two million occupied, and docile pot smokers do make ideal prisoners.The only Goddess who professed no interest in using cannabis herself was Nancy Lord Johnson, a Nevada lawyer and MD who in 1992 ran for U.S. vice-president on the Libertarian ticket. Lord Johnson delivered a chilling speech that might have been called The Drug War and the Erosion of American Liberty. "Kicking in your door and shooting your dog, locking your kids in another room, this is done in the name of getting the big bad drug dealer, and now they're starting to do it to everybody," she said. She described the sad case of an alternative therapist who had been administering liquid deprenyl citrate. "Anyone know what liquid drprenyl is? It's an anti-Parkinson's drug. His particlular version of it was not the FDA-approved version but it was better. He had a patient getting sick on the approved drug, the only thing that made her able to live her life and not be shaking was the liquid deprenyl citrate he made available to her." Charged and convicted of supplying the unapproved drug, the therapist got 13 years.The highlight of the Cup was to be the induction of Ina May Gaskin into something called the Counter-Cultural Hall of Fame. Gaskin is the founding mother of the modern American midwifery movement, and author of the bible of alternative childbirthing, Spiritual Midwifery. At a mid-week press conference, she was introduced by her husband, Stephen, who was fresh from a year spent trying to push marijuana rights within Ralph Nader's Green Party. "Ralph thinks marijuana is like a faulty windshield wiper," he said. "A consumer product that could hurt you." But he said Nader had eventually come to respect his view that what's happening to marijuana users in the United States is "a massive civil-rights violation, on the level of a class war. Because we're a random tribe, scattered and isolated, they exploit that."At a press conference, Ina May Gaskin related how, as a curious bookworm in the 1950s, she had dug around libraries in Iowa trying to find out more about "this mysterious plant" that her jazz-musician heroes like Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane smoked. Beyond that she had little to say about cannabis except that it had never done her any harm; instead she talked about childbirth as an event most women still need to reclaim. "It doesn't make sense to do surgery to cut a baby out of a woman when there is a way the baby is meant to come out," she said. Why do doctors push for caesareans? "It seems the problem is really fear of women's sexuality, and women's creative power, and it's time to get over it," she informed a rapt audience that included punk diva Patti Smith, who later spoke glowingly of the role Gaskin's book had played in the birth of her own children.Gaskin approaches birth as a sensual experience, using such touch techniques as stimulation of the nipples and kissing to harness the passions of arousal to bring forth life. "A woman can orgasm during childbirth, and most doctors don't want you to know it," she said, at which point a woman in the audience, unable to contain herself, interrupted to say that in 1979 while giving birth to her second child. "I told my doctor, I think I'm having an orgasm, and he told me I was crazy."That was the press conference. On the final night of the Cup, at the big party at the Melkweg, it was a harder sell getting the rowdy, mostly male, party crowd to pay attention to a lengthy introduction of Gaskin, featuring slides of breach births and such food for thought as "lying on her back is the worst possible position for a woman giving birth." The crowd was more interested in who was going to win the People's Cup (Barney's Breakfast Bar), or Best Coffeeshop (De Rokerij). Hilary Black announced the winner for best hashish (the Water Hash from Katsu), telling the crowd, "I look forward to the day when high quality hashish is available all over the world."Actually, for do-it-yourselfers it already is: Earlier in the evening, Goddess Mila Jansen, a Dutch pot entrepreneur who invented the Ice-olater, a simple system to make hashish from cannabis leaves and flowers, announced her product is now used in 37 countries. While America keeps locking people away, the rest of the world is coming out to play.Note: Vancouverites were highly visible at Amsterdam's Cannabis Cup, and sometimes visibly high. But, writes Brian Preston, important stuff happened too.Victoria-based writer Brian Preston is researching a book on marijuana culture around the world. Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)Author: Brian PrestonPublished: December 9, 2000Copyright: The Vancouver Sun 2000Address: 200 Granville Street, Ste.#1, Vancouver BC V6C 3N3Fax: (604) 605-2323Contact: sunletters pacpress.southam.caWebsite: http://www.vancouversun.com/Related Articles & Web Sites:Cannabis Culturehttp://www.cannabisculture.com/The Compassion Clubhttp://www.thecompassionclub.org/The Real Sin City of Amsterdam http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread7113.shtmlTraveling To Amsterdam For The Cannabis Cup http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread4022.shtml END SNIP --> Snipped Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help Post Comment Name: Optional Password: E-Mail: Subject: Comment: [Please refrain from using profanity in your message] Link URL: Link Title: