Highest greetings from Detroit, the most ruined major city in the USA, where I continue to reside and pursue medical solutions to my physical problems as an old man in America. You’ll be happy to hear that I’m getting better and look forward to being able to return to Amsterdam for a few months later this year.
My friends are always curious as to why I’m so crazy about Amsterdam. They think there’s got to be more to it than simply being able to buy your marijuana over the counter in coffeeshops and smoke it among friends without fear of arrest or interference from the vicious forces of law and order.
Well, I’d have to say that’s a pretty good place to start, and it surpasses in civilization qualities anything we have in the United States, wherever you might go. Here in Michigan, for example, we’re about to pass a marijuana legalization act that we wrote ourselves, and it bans public smoking of marijuana! What were we thinking?
Incidentally, it’s fascinating to witness the recent collapse of the Marijuana Policy Project, the white-horse-riding institution that was going to save us from fucking up the marijauana initiative again and came in to write our legalization measure as Regulating Marijuana Like Alcohol. This is just about the dumbest slogan I’ve ever heard in more than half a century of marijuana activism.
Almost as soon as they inserted this asinine language change into our marijuana legalization struggle being led at the time by MILegalize, they started having trouble with the behavior of their leadership and then ran out of money to support the Michigan marijuana initiative. Now, while citizens in Michigan continue to struggle to make sure that enough legalization supporters actually cast their votes this November, MPP is trying to regroup and remain in business.
Me, I’d like to suggest that they get rid of this alcohol regulation concept once and for all and never bring it up again. Marijuana has nothing to do with alcohol and has no business being regulated like alcohol in any particular. Marijuana needs to be regulated like carrots or string beans, and the entire legal bureaucracy dedicated to fucking with marijuana smokers and producers
and sellers must be completely scuttled.
There’s no other solution!
But like I started out to say, there’s more to civilization in Amsterdam and the Netherlands than buying weed over the counter and smoking freely. There’s the generally humane behavior of the police and law enforcement bureaucracy, which doesn’t assault the citizenry with a lot of sirens and flashing lights and speeding cars and heavily armed coppers shooting down innocent citizens in the streets.
One consistent measure of barbarism in public life is the number of prisoners and the prisons that hold them. In the 20 years I’ve been visiting regularly in Holland, they’ve closed down at least a dozen prisons for lack of appropriate inmates, shutting down four just last week. That’s always good news.
Even Michigan is about to close down a prison in the near future, and when they get rid of the anti-marijuana laws, they’re sure to have to get rid of a lot more cells. As one of those Michiganders who’s been there—I spent three years in prison for marijuana possession—that’ll make for another happy day for this old man.
Another great thing about Amsterdam is its sheer physical beauty as a compact urban center organized around a gorgeous system of canals and sporting architecture designed 500 years ago that’s still stunning to contemplate. Public transportation exists on a genius level and life is abundant everywhere you turn in the central city.
But for me the coffeshops are the ultimate mark of civilization. Each one is different, and each reflects the vision (or lack of vision) of the individual proprietors. The trick is to find the one (or ones) that best suit your own physical and emotional needs and then frequent it (or them) as often as you can.
It has been my quest for about ten years to open a coffeeshop equivalent in Detroit where I could hang out and do my work while I’m in the Motor City—sort of a Bohemian Embassy for people in the Detroit Metropolitan Area where we could get together with our friends and smoke some herb, drink some juice or coffee or tea, listen to music from Radio Free Amsterdam
(www.radiofreeamstredam.org) on the sound system, hook up our laptops, tune into the extra-strong wi-fi service and get our work done in a warm, friendly, inspirational atmosphere.
This is the environment I enjoy at the 420 Café and the Dutch Flowers coffeeshops in Amsterdam, and I’m determined to see it take root here—hopefully before I pass on to the afterlife. I spent two years working with a group of characters at a place called the BoHouse on the west side of Detroit trying to effect the establishment of a coffeeshop with a performance venue attached, but all came to naught when they decided to simply grow some weed in the facility and gave up the idea of a public facility where weedheads could meet.
I went on to a place called Detroit Life on Gratiot Avenue in the Eastern Market district and spent two more years in intermittent residence trying to make my idea of a coffeeshop become a reality, but in the end the asshole who had the space raised a sum of money in my name from some investors, threw me out, ripped off my idea and incorporated his venue under the name of a hippie collective I had founded in the 1960s with Rob Tyner of the MC-5 and the great artist Gary Grimshaw, both now deceased.
Fortunately for me, the identity thief was a completely incompetent businessman, failed to make the thing work, and was recently forced to evacuate the premises. Me, I went on to keep talking with other people and pursued about three other potential opportunities, but nothing would work out and I’m still sitting at my desk at home, smoking my joints by myself, making my own coffees and working in utter solitude instead of within the friendly coffeeshop environment I crave.
Even with the idiotic perseverance of the Detroit City Council in trying to stamp out marijuana outlets in the city and eventually limiting the number of dispensaries to somewhere between 50 and 75 shops, there are still lots of places to buy your medicine, leave the premises and smoke it somewhere in private.
But there’s nowhere in Detroit to visit on a daily basis and smoke your weed with friends and fellow patients, listen to music and tune into cyberspace in peace. This is the place I need, and I feel confident that, once available, a local Social Aid & Pleasure Club would meet with a warm and enthusiastic response from Detroit smokers. Let’s hope we get the chance to see, and then we’ll know that our dream has come true. FREE THE WEED!
—Detroit
June 23-24, 2018
© 2018 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
