A Column By John Sinclair
Hi everybody, as Ernie Harwell used to say, and highest greetings from the campus of Harvard University, where I’ve been in residence for the month of October at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School as a guest of my friend Christian Greer, who now goes by the title of Dr. J.C. Greer and is doing his first post-doctoral teaching term here at Harvard, where he’s teaching classes like Acid Communism and others centering on LSD, weirdness and the occult. Christian also runs my Instagram account for me.
Christian is a graduate of the University of Amsterdam, where I met him and his companion Michelle Owing and was their guest several times, staying with them in their apartment on Jacob von Lennepstraat. Now they’ve both completed their PhDs, Christian is teaching at Harvard Divinity School and Michelle is ensconced as an art historian at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where Christian hopes to join her as a fellow faculty member next year.
Thinking of our splendid times as residents of Amsterdam, perhaps the most civilized city on earth, I was reminded of an article I read last week in an on-line news source called DutchNews.nl to which I have subscribed for more than 20 years since I started visiting Amsterdam as High Priest of the Cannabis Cup in 1998. DutchNews.nl reports that local businesses are adding pressure on the City Council to “clean up” the city’s sex and drugs reputation.
According to DutchNews.nl, “eight Amsterdam employers’ organizations have joined forces in an effort to persuade the city council to radically reform the city’s image as a haven for sex and drugs, adding further pressure on officials to make major changes. In particular, city officials should act to tackle the window brothels in the red light district and change the policy on cannabis cafes, both as a matter of urgency.”
Earlier this yearthe city marketing agency Amsterdam & partners told DutchNews.nl that “the city is aiming to build a new tourist industry that is socially, economically and ecologically ‘sustainable’.” Indeed the city council has been talking for some time about how best to tackle the problems caused by “budget tourists,”or people who come to the city simply looking to have a good time in the red light district where prostitution is legal and in the coffeeshops where weed is available over the counter.
“More and more people are coming to Amsterdam who have no respect for the city and are only looking out for number one,”the city’s marketing director said. “We have now drawn up a 10-point priority list, which includes a total ban on holiday rentals such as AirBnB, focused campaigns targeting ‘quality’ tourists, and money to pay for more street wardens. Cannabis cafes should only be open to residents, and there should be fewer music festivals.”
Further, the locals’ plan said, “Mini supermarkets should be banned from selling alcohol and the sex industry should be moved in its entirety to a hotel in a different location, perhaps to a special room-rental complex for prostitutes or an ‘erotic center’ complete with prostitution, sex theatres and other facilities.”
DutchNews.nl also revealed that political pressure is mounting on the city’s coalition to agree to ban non-residents from the city’s cannabis cafes, or coffeeshops. A survey in February showed that a third of the tourists questioned said that if they were no longer allowed into coffee shops, they would visit Amsterdam less frequently, and 11% would not come at all. One third of the British tourists said that coffeeshops were their main reason to come to Amsterdam, and 42% said they would come less frequently if only local residents could buy cannabis.
There are a lot of bad things one could say about the British tourists, who are only an hour’s plane ride away from Amsterdam, but it’s mostly because they come to get drunk and stagger around the streets of the red light district making a lot of noise and acting stupid. Simple law enforcement techniques popular in the United States and Britain could correct this problem if applied with intelligence and good sense, but to ban or plan out of existence the presence of such tourists in favor of upper-echelon white people who will stay in expensive hotels and dine at exclusive restaurants is a solution that borders on economic fascism and casts the Dutch locals into an entirely different light.
Amsterdam has spent 500 years developing its unique cultural setting, a form of western civilization that far surpasses anything we have on offer in America, England, or elsewhere in Europe. The police state aspects we are accustomed to in our cities and municipalities are simply not present in Amsterdam, and the street-level authorities stay pretty much out of everyone’s business unless they spot someone robbing or trying to hurt other citizens. There are no homeless people sleeping on the ground or in doorways in the central city, no drug pushers accosting people on the street, no sleazy characters making life miserable for regular people who are enjoying the attractions of the city’s streets.
People like myself who like to get high in public can go into one of the 200 or so remaining coffeeshops in Amsterdam, buy five grams of weed or hashish over the counter, sit down, order a coffee, tea or juice, and smoke their cannabis alone or with their friends. There are strict rules against minors in the shops, and rowdy or antisocial behavior is simply not tolerated or allowed.
In my experience, the Dutch coffeeshops provide the highest form of human interaction available anywhere on earth, they pay taxes to the government, and they are a credit to the country and its people who have allowed them to develop over the past 50 years since marijuana use was designated as a decriminalized “gray area” by the national parliament.
Not so far from Holland, in nearby Spain, the International Cannabis Chronicle reports “the very greyness of the status of cannabis per Spanish law” has allowed Spanish citizens to consume cannabis in private clubs for the past three years. But one of the leaders of the Spanish club movement, Albert Tió, the secretary of a cannabis association in Barcelona with nearly 4,000 members, was convicted of crimes against the “public health and illicit association” by the Provincial Court in Barcelona. His conviction was upheld by the Spanish Supreme Court, but Tió is arguing that his conviction is a violation of the rights of autonomy and personal dignity contained in the European Convention on Human Rights.
Tio’s case could impact other European cannabis social club models, particularly in countries like Germany where the right of cannabis has now been enshrined as a medical one. While four countries in Europe—Denmark, Holland, Luxembourg, and Switzerland—are moving forward with recreational trials if not plans, Spain as well as countries like Germany have not moved forward to enshrine a formal medical or recreational industry. This also appears now to be on the brink of changing, one way or the other.
When will the federal government of the United States join this elite company? We should see before too long, pending the results of the recent election which I’m unable to predict at this writing, but I’ll definitely have more to say about this in next month’s column. I hope you voted like I did to get rid of that asshole Ronald Rump! Free The Weed!
—Detroit
October 24, 2020
© 2020 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
