A Column by John Sinclair
Hi, everybody. Happy Valentine’s Day, Happy Mardi Gras, happy month of February from front to back. Today is my daughter Celia’s date of birth as well, so I’ll wish her a happy birthday here.I’ve been taken with the current state of the marijuana scene in Amsterdam, where I spent most of 15 years until I took ill after being struck in the back by a bicycle while strolling down the street on my way to the Spui, knocked flat on my face and taken to the hospital.
As a U.S. citizen on SSI and a penurious tourist in Holland, I was forced to pay for my medical treatments and my prescriptions with cash money, of which I had only enough to keep eating and smoking my weed.
So I evacuated back to Detroit, where I’m taken care of by Dr. Mohammad Kang and his excellent staff in the Rosa Parks Geriatric Center at the Detroit Medical Center, just blocks from my apartment.
I started to fly over to Amsterdam three years ago, but I turned back. I suffered a heart attack the next day and had quintuple bypass surgery a few days later, so it’s been five years since I’ve had the pleasure of strolling alongside the canals and down the ancient streets of Amsterdam.
A recent story by Senay Boztas in DutchNews.nl titled “Blowback: Nuisance Tourists Unwelcome in Amsterdam” reveals that “Amsterdam has proposed a major package of measures to combat nuisance tourism as the city ‘welcomes’ its 18 millionth overnight guest this year, triggering a pledge to limit tourism numbers to 20 million.”
City government authorities have opined that “smoking cannabis on the street should be forbidden in tourist hot spots,” Boztas writes, and they also want to ban “cannabis sales in the red light district at the weekends, from 4pm on Thursday to Sunday.”
Further, they are looking to “earlier closing times for restaurants, bars and brothels in the red light district, and a public ‘stay away’ campaign to be launched in 2023 to counter low-grade tourism. The city is also considering raising the tourist tax at peak times. . . . Mayor Femke Halsema has already said she wants to ban tourists from coffee shops.”
Man, talk about making a person feel unwelcome! Although Amsterdam has been a beacon of common sense and relative enlightenment on the marijuana issue for a long time now, the current batch of squares who are running things there are a different breed of human being altogether, much like the assholes in the white 1% who run our own country.
Now that America is beginning to wise up on the issue, thanks to the efforts of our marijuana activists and their fellow citizens who have voted in medical and recreational legalization by means of petition drives, it’s saddening indeed to hear this shit about Amsterdam today.
The years I spent in Amsterdam were delightfully free of government interference or police harassment of any kind, much unlike my experience in the United Snakes. I often say that I spent 15 years there without ever even speaking to a police officer, and I lived out every day in one or more coffee shops, of which there were hundreds at the turn of the century but now fewer than 250.
Weed was everywhere, available at less than 10 euros a gram, and you could buy your grass or hash in the civilized setting of a coffee shop, order a beverage, take a seat at the bar or at a table, and roll up your joints of choice. Then you could purchase five grams of your favorite smoke to carry with you, and if you needed more than that, you’d just move over to another coffee shop and get five more.
The other crazy thing about their amped-up war on marijuana smokers is that they are pushing away the money and prestige they gain by being a drug tourist destination and are trying to deny the coffee shops a profitable existence and drive them out of business.
This whole thing is like a scenario from a pipe smoker’s nightmare. Amsterdam tries to shut down the smokers’ paradise, while New York, Detroit and other American cities are opening up the door to legal consumption of weed.
As Shirin Ali has written in Slate, “New York legalized weed back in March 2021 and now, over a year later, finally, the state’s first licensed dispensary has opened in New York City.”
And here in Detroit, where the city council—led by a bunch of former police officers, clergy people and social workers—has held off licensing any recreational dispensaries for almost five years since legalization in 2018, they’ve finally allowed marijuana outlets to open in the city.
Before legalization there were a total of 283 dispensaries operating within the city limits, but the city council closed them all down and is just now allowing its citizens to buy a license—at ridiculously exorbitant rates—and do business.
I guess Amsterdam isn’t so different after all: Both there and here the squares are willing to throw away vast quantities of commercial income in order to preserve their antiquated cultural values. What the fuck?? FREE THE WEED!
—Detroit
January 17, 2023
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