-Aktuelles zur Drogenpolitik in England... -

From: Nikolaus Spieckermann
Subject: Aktuelles zur Drogenpolitik in England...
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 13:07:34 +0100

Zu diesem artikel muss gesagt werden dass der telelpgraph das Aequivalent zu
den Salzburger Nachrichten, der 'Presse', Sueddeutsche etc ist - konservativ
und reaktionaer (Thatcher Waehlerschaft)
Der Unterschied zu Oesterreich liegt wohl darin, dass ich mir schwer
vorstellen kann, dass die Presse oder die SZ Herrn Schulmeister mit Thomas
Chorherr im Schlepptau nach Amterdam schicken um sich dort fuer ein
Reportage einzupuffen...
(der hintergrund der Geschichte ist, dass das konservative Schattenkabinett
ein 'tough on drugs' Kampagne gestartet hat (in etwa: ' Wenn wir an die
MNacht kommen dann werden wir nciht nur aus der EU austretetn sondern auch
noch allen Schmuddeln, die Drogen nehmen und Grossmuetter vergewaltigen £100
als Strafe abknoepfen und wenn nciht dann schicken wir sie nach Singapore wo
die Todesstrafe auf haschen steht'. Peinlicherweise meldeten sich nach der
ankeundigung etwa 7 (mittlerweile fast 10) sehr prominente abgeordnete der
konservatievn und meinten dies sie laecherlich, auch sie haetten alle schon
geraucht und wuerden dies sogar teilweise immer noch tun...)

15Oct2000 UK: Review - Stone me!
By ALEXANDER CHANCELLOR. (ehem Herausgeber des Spectator, Vatikan
Correspondent und 60 Jahre alt)
I am glad I'm not one of those members of the shadow cabinet who were
ordered to tell the truth about their pot-smoking, for I would have been
much embarrassed to reveal that in 60 years I had not tried it at all.
I do remember about 30 years ago being at a supper party in Rome when the
person next to me at the table passed me what I thought was a lit cigarette.
I have always been fond of cigarettes, but not of damp, half-smoked ones
belonging to people I don't know - and I thought this one looked unhygienic
and might even carry some disease.
Not wishing to be rude, I took it, but was revolted by its sickly smell and
hastily passed it on, realising that the stuff inside it was not tobacco but
marijuana. I resolved never to touch the weed and until this week, it was
one of the few resolutions I have ever kept. But The Sunday Telegraph has
been my downfall, persuading me to spend a night of depravity in the
cannabis capital of the world.
Knowing practically nothing about the drug against which Ann Widdecombe has
started a crusade, I consulted the American National Institute of Drug
Abuse, which
has a page on its website entitled
"Marijuana: Facts Parents Need to Know". "Marijuana is a green, brown, or
grey mixture of dried, shredded leaves, stems, seeds of the hemp plant
(Cannabis sativa)," it began. "All forms of cannabis are mind-altering
(psychoactive) drugs; they all contain THC (delta-9-tetrahydricannabinol).
Marijuana's effect on the user depends on the strength or potency of the THC
it contains."
So, come what may, my mind would be altered; but how was I to know which of
the hundreds of kinds of cannabis legally available in Amsterdam would be
the safest for me to try? "At all costs, you should avoid `skunk'," said one
of my godsons. "It is 10 times stronger than ordinary hash and has names
like AK-47 and Mindblaster." Being an ecologically-aware young person, he
also disapproved of skunk because it was genetically modified and grown in
greenhouses. So I should go instead for "weed" (African bush weed, he said
they might call it).
And how would that alter my mind? "It could make you a bit paranoid," was
the reply. "It can make you think everybody thinks you're stoned. Also, your
eyes can go bloodshot. And it can make you thirsty and crave sweet things -
this is called having the `munchies'. But it can enhance creativity." Martin
Amis, when I bumped into him at a party last week, didn't agree. It would
probably just make me want to go to my hotel room and watch television, he
said.
When I called my 33-year-old daughter, Cecilia, to ask her for advice, she
just said: "Dad, don't drink too much." She told me it was bad to drink
alcohol before smoking a joint, it could make you pass out. She also knows
that I am a traditionalist whose vices are of the old-fashioned kind.
The Sunday Telegraph had said that I could take a companion with me to
Amsterdam, and I chose my older brother John. At 73, he's another
traditionalist, but much less fearful than me of new experiences. John, an
antiquarian bookseller, is also a gregarious fellow who doesn't mind whom he
engages in conversation, a quality I thought could be useful in the coffee
shops of Amsterdam, which I had imagined (wrongly, as it turned out) would
be full of scary characters.
What the Dutch call "coffee shops" are the places where cannabis is legally
bought and consumed. They look outwardly like ordinary cafes and in most
respects they are. But they are also shrines to the culture of cannabis,
with countless varieties on sale for consumption on or off the premises. You
make your choice from "menus" - books even heavier and grander than the wine
lists of expensive restaurants - in which hundreds of kinds of the noxious
substance are listed, with photographs or even actual
samples of them glued to the pages beside their names.
Amsterdam is probably how Ann Widdecombe imagines hell. Tolerance of soft
drugs is not "zero" there, but absolute. Anybody can legally possess up to
500 grammes of cannabis, a whopping amount. They can grow it
in their window boxes. They can buy
it in shops. They can smoke it in the street. The only places where it is
not welcome are normal bars, cafes and restaurants where cigars and
cigarettes still reign supreme.
Whatever the bad effects of soft drug legalisation, it has certainly
achieved one thing. It has made cannabis banal. There is no glamour in it.
You can ask anybody in the street where to find the nearest coffee shop, and
even the solidest citizen will give you directions in a matter-of-fact way.
Yet only this week the European Union revealed that many more 15-and
16-year-old children use cannabis in Britain, where it is an offence, than
in Holland, where it is not - 37.5 per cent here compared to 31.1 per cent
there.
When we arrived from the airport at Blakes, Anouska Hempel's snazzy new
hotel, I asked one of the "young,
elegant staff clad in black designer suits" (I quote from the hotel's
publicity material, but the description
is accurate) whether I could order
cannabis from room service. He looked a little surprised, but said he was
sure it would be possible. However, we thought we would waste no time and
took a taxi to the first recommended coffee shop on our list, the Bluebird.
This was the beginning of a long
coffee-shop crawl during which many joints were smoked, so my memory has
suffered a little. But the Bluebird was in what appeared to be a very
respectable quarter of old Amsterdam. There was nothing about it to suggest
decadence, apart from a notice in the window saying that children under 18
were not allowed inside. There was a comfortable room with a bar upstairs in
which three or four men with ear-rings or long hair were puffing away rather
dolefully.
The person in charge was a pale young man with magnificent hair,
like the wig of King Charles II. I approached him at the bar and told him I
was new to this game and needed advice before getting started. "Have you
never had cannabis before?" he asked, without any show of surprise. "No, I
haven't," I said. "Well I will tell you what I always say to first-timers,"
he said. "Do not be surprised if it does nothing for you at all. You may
feel good, but on the other hand, you may feel nothing."
I secretly liked the idea of feeling nothing, but feared that The Sunday
Telegraph might be disappointed. "What should I do if I feel nothing?" I
asked. "Try something stronger?" "No, I don't think that would be wise," he
replied. "Just come back tomorrow and keep trying. You'll feel something in
the end." But we had only 24 hours in Amsterdam; so if I was going to feel
anything, it had better be sooner than that.
The man rolled two joints, one for me and one for my brother. Mine was
called Moroccan Pollen, I think, but I didn't know what John's was. All I
knew was that they were both supposed to be mild. Then we sat side by side
on a sofa while the photographer Andy Hall, who had accompanied us from
London, started snapping away.
I hold Andy largely responsible for
the coughing fit that followed. He made me repeat the same performance again
and again in rapid succession until the inside of my mouth felt as if
somebody had been at it with a cheese-grater, my throat was sore and dry,
and my coughing was brutally puncturing the woozy, dream-like atmosphere
into which the other customers had settled. "How do you feel?" Andy asked.
"Not tremendously good," I said.
John, meantime, was doing rather better. "I feel quite agreeable," he
reported. Then, after a little while, he became silly. "It's delightful
here," he said. "This place sums up the whole world. The whole world is in
here." I looked around. Three Russians from New York, a young man and two
girls, one of them rather pretty, had joined us on our sofa.
The pictures on the walls were of frogs and crocodiles and fairies,
suggesting psychedelic visions. A blond man with an earring and an
evil-looking smile was standing goofily against the wall. But in every other
respect the Bluebird looked to me like a pretty ordinary cafe. Having taken
against my own joint, I borrowed John's and started to feel happier. I asked
the man with the Charles II hair what it contained. "Skunk," he said. "Oh,
no! Not skunk!" "It's very weak skunk," he assured me.
We decided to move on to another coffee shop up the street called Happy
Hour, which had a sign outside it offering "Smokes and Jokes". The boss of
Happy Hour, who said he was called Haile and came from Surinam, rolled us
White Widows, whatever they are, to a background of loud reggae music. Then
he joined us at a table for a chat.
Haile was an amiable chatterbox. He started expounding on the art of using
cannabis. "You don't just smoke it. You don't just inhale it. It's an art, a
way of life. You have to live it. You have to be it. That's the secret."
John was beginning to look as if he'd mastered the secret. I certainly had
not. I was beginning to think I would like to go to my hotel room and watch
television. But that was not to be.
There was a final coffee shop on our list, the Grasshopper, which had been
suggested to us as an example of a large establishment, unlike the cosy
little places we had visited so far. As we walked there, I found myself
feeling rather giddy and tottering a bit. It was like being pleasantly
tipsy, but without the sensual gratification that alcohol can afford. I
would have preferred to have achieved this merry state with a few glasses of
good wine.
The Grasshopper was lacking in any charm, just a large underground room in
which dozens of dull-looking people sat at rows of tables arranged in tiers
all facing the bar, as if it were a cinema screen. It was midnight and I had
had enough, so we found a Spanish restaurant still open in the Red Light
district and ate Spanish omelettes before going to bed. I was too tired to
watch television.
Next morning, to my surprise, I was feeling fine. Before leaving for the
airport, we paid a visit to The Hash Marijuana Hemp Museum on a pretty old
canal street beside the Sensi Seed Bank Grow Shop for grow-your-own
enthusiasts. Containing, among much else, a live indoor marijuana garden,
this peculiar museum devotes one display to Queen Victoria's medicinal use
of the plant and another to the notorious British drugs smuggler Howard
Marks, whose story, it says, is "full of excitement, humour and charm".
According to the museum,
cannabis use is very old indeed. In 450 BC, Herodotus apparently wrote about
the pleasures of the
"cannabis bath" and the billows of steam and smoke it produced. "No Greek
vapour bath can in any way surpass it," he maintained. "The Scythians howl
with joy when having a cannabis bath." I think I might be ready for that
now.
(c) Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2000.
Source: SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 15/10/2000 P1

(p-tv)