By Frederik Hartig

In July, the Dutch government will introduce a nationwide smoking ban in bars, cafes and restaurants, aimed at protecting workers. But it will also make life a lot harder for the country’s infamous coffee shops, where customers will only be allowed to smoke pure cannabis.

De Tweede Kamer is located on a small side street in Amsterdam, not far from the flower market. A painting of Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard hangs on the wall, and next to it, a little bit higher, there’s one of Queen Wilhelmina. White ornaments rise up the wall like smoke rings around the portraits. The coffee shop opened in 1985, and has since become an institution in the Dutch capital, a kind of art museum for the residents of Amsterdam, owner Paul Wilhelm proudly says.

But Wilhelm is worried about his company’s future. On July 1, a smoking ban will come into force in Dutch restaurants, bars and cafes. The ban will also apply to the country’s more than 700 coffee shops, which are infamous worldwide for selling soft drugs.

“Coffee shops will be treated in the same manner as other catering businesses,” Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende told public broadcaster NOS after the government issued its decision on Friday. “It would have been wrong to move towards a smoke-free catering industry and then make an exception for coffee shops. People would not have understood that.”

The chances of getting an exemption are limited, says Mark Jacobsen of BCD, a nationwide association of coffee shop owners that has been fighting to get special provisions for the cafes.

Jacobsen argues that it’s absurd that the law is being applied to coffee shops. “In a cafe,” he said, “you come to drink something. In a restaurant you come to eat. But when you come to a coffee shop, you come to smoke, so smoking has to be allowed in a coffee shop.”

But Dutch Health Minister Ab Klink has no plans to make any exceptions. Coffee shop employees, he argues, also have the right to protection from tobacco smoke.

But Wilhelm claims it’s a specious argument. After all, people who apply for jobs in a coffee shop know that smoking is the company’s core business. “If the boys are old enough to be sent to Afghanistan, then you can’t tell me that people want to protect them from smoke in the workplace. They’re old enough to decide on their own. They can vote, they can go to war — but now they won’t even be allowed to make this decision?”

Perversely, the law, intended to protect workers from smoke, only applies to tobacco. In the Netherlands, that has resulted in a rather bizarre result: Smoking pot or hashish in coffee shops will remain legal; it just can’t be mixed with tobacco. If someone wants to roll their joint with tobacco, then they have to smoke it outside. Wilhelm can only shake his head in disbelief. “That sounds a bit to me like going into a cafe and being able to buy a beer without being able to drink it there. But the cafe still lets you drink whiskey, rum and vodka.”

Besides, it will be difficult to monitor whether someone has secretly rolled his joint with tobacco or not. Mark Jacobson doubts that Dutch officials will begin policing the ban immediately when it goes into effect in July. “We’ll just have to see how strictly they enforce it,” he says.

Under the new provision, he explains, “If an official comes into a coffee shop and sees someone smoking a joint, he must confiscate it and send it to a lab to test whether it contains tobacco. It’s such an arduous procedure that it is going to create numerous problems. I don’t think they will apply it very strictly during the first year.”

Jacobsen feels the world has been turned on its head in Holland. “In every other country they do just the opposite — there they check whether there is cannabis inside,” he says with a laugh.

‘An Absurd Decision’

There are exceptions to the ban. If an establishment can set up a separate room or add a glass partition to ensure that employees are not exposed to tobacco smoke, then smoking is permitted in those rooms as long as service is not provided.

That may be easy for larger coffee shops, but it will effectively downgrade smaller coffee shops into cannabis convenience stores where people drop in to buy pot but don’t stick around. Jacobsen says he is planning to add a wall in his coffee shop, called The Rookies. The wall would separate the bar from the rest of the room, and he claims it will be the largest legal smoking space in Amsterdam.

In the smaller Tweede Kamer, though, it will be almost impossible to sufficiently protect workers from guests’ tobacco smoke. Still, Wilhelm says he doesn’t want to operate his coffee shop like a takeaway restaurant. “The soul of the Tweede Kamer has always been the social contact, the discussions, the chat, reading the newspaper or talking about politics. Now that’s all being destroyed by what I think is an absurd decision.”

Wilhelm may be fighting to preserve his coffee shop’s convivial atmosphere, but Health Minister Klink has an altogether different view of coffee shop customers. In a letter to coffee shop association LOC in which he defended his smoking ban, he wrote: “A positive side effect of the smoking ban may be that consumers who spend the whole day hanging out in coffee shops will find other things to do with their time.”

More than a million tourists visit Amsterdam’s coffee shops each year, and Jacobsen believes more of them will now smoke pot on the city’s streets. “People are going to be smoking in a lot of other places — on the streets, in the parks, at home.” With the coffee shops, he argues, you at least had a place where you could confine much of the city’s pot-smoking activities.

The ban will also place additional burdens on coffee shop owners. If, for example, a crowd gathers in front of a coffee shop, it is the owners’ responsibility to make sure they go away. If the shop owners aren’t able to do so, despite making a visible effort, Klink has proposed banning all forms of smoking around the coffee shop.

It’s a practice that’s already been tested. In February 2006, the Amsterdam district De Baarsjes banned cannabis consumption on the local Mercatorplein square. Youth from other parts of the city where there were fewer coffee shops used to swarm to the 15 located in De Baarsjes. The city’s statistical office confirmed that the ban had successfully reduced the number of disturbances caused by young pot smokers and that a feeling of safety had returned to the area around the square.

But both the GroenLinks and Demokratie 66 parties question the scope of the study in a report at the end of January in the Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool. They argued that residents of nearby Columbusplein square also should have been asked. Since the ban was put in place on Mercatorplein, there have been more pot-related disturbances at Columbusplein, they claim.

For his part, Wilhelm is still hoping to secure an exemption from the smoking ban. In July, Tweede Kamer will prohibit its guests from smoking cigarettes. He will also inform his customers that they are not permitted to roll tobacco into their joints. But he said he has no intention of monitoring every joint rolled in his shop.

It’s also possible that officials will place a low priority on policing the smoking ban in coffee shops and, in a typically Dutch fashion, a situation would be created in which smoking would be officially banned but still tolerated.

“But that may also be wishful thinking,” says Wilhelm.

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“And all the people perceived the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the voice of the horn, and the mountain smoking.” Thus the book of Exodus describes the impressive moment of the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai.

The “perceiving of the voices” has been interpreted endlessly since these words were first written. When Professor Benny Shanon, professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reads the verse, he recalls a powerful hallucinatory experience he had when he visited the Amazon and drank a potion made from a plant called ayahuasca.

“One of the things that happens when you drink the potion is a visual experience created via sounds,” he says.Shanon presents a provocative theory in an article published this week in the philosophy journal Time and Mind. The religious ceremonies of the Israelites included the use of psychotropic materials that can found in the Negev and Sinai, he says.

“I have no direct proof of this interpretation,” and such proof cannot be expected, he says. However, “it seems logical that something was altered in people’s consciousness. There are other stories in the Bible that mention the use of plants: for example, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden.”

Shanon, former head of the Hebrew University psychology department, said his first experience with ayahuasca was in 1991 when he was invited to a religious ceremony in the northern Amazon in 1991 in Brazil.

“I experienced visions that had spiritual-religious connotations,” he says.

Since that time, he has used it hundreds of times, and has published a book about the plant.

“Hypotheses have been around for 20 years connecting the beginning of religions with psychoactive materials,” Shanon says. He believes the Israelites used two plants in Sinai and the Negev: one of them is wild rue, a hallucinogen used by the Bedoin to this day. However this plant is not identified with any plant mentioned in the Bible.

The acacia tree also has psychedelic properties, Shanon says, which the Israelites could have used. The acacia is mentioned frequently in the Bible, and was the type of wood of which the Ark of the Covenant was made. According to Shanon, he drank a potion prepared from a species of acacia while he was in South America, which caused similar experiences to those produced by the ayahuasca.

Shanon also sees signs of a hallucinogenic vision in the story of the burning bush. “Moses ‘looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed,’” Shanon quotes from Exodus 3:2. Time passes differently when under the influence of the plant, he notes. “That’s why Moses thought the bush was not consumed. It should have been burned in the time he thought had passed. And in that time, he heard God speaking to him.”

“But not everyone who uses a plant like this brings the Torah,” Shanon concedes. “For that, you have to be Moses.”

‘Prince of Pot’ given prison time

B.C. man says U.S. sentence is a political muzzle

By PAUL SHUKOVSKY
P-I REPORTER

A Vancouver marijuana activist, whose arrest and pending extradition for selling marijuana seeds over the Internet outraged many Canadians, says he’s cut a deal with federal prosecutors in Seattle and is going to prison.

U.S. authorities portray Marc Emery, dubbed the “Prince of Pot,” as a major drug trafficker who pocketed millions of dollars and fueled organized crime.

But Emery, 50, says the prosecution was politically driven and designed to muzzle his vocal opposition to laws criminalizing pot.

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sometimes we all have bad days and we need to hear about good things. thanks ben! anytime you want to come to Israel, members of the Green Leaf Party will be happy to burn one down with you.

Shane Collins backs Chief Constable of Wales comments

The Green Party today came out in strong support of calls for legalisation of drugs from Richard Brunstrom, Chief Constable of North Wales. (1)

Shane Collins, Green Party Drugs Spokesperson and GLA candidate for Lambeth and Southwark said: “We warmly welcome this report which speaks the truths no government minister dare mention.

“This policy as outlined by the Brunstrom report has been Green Party policy for some years now. All we would add is we would ban the advertising of any newly legalised drugs and ensure clear information on strength and variety and and strict age limit on sale.

“The report shows clearly how a policy of regulation and legalisation would cut crime and remove the motor of gang and gun crime in urban England.”

(1) news.bbc.co.uk

At long last, feel free to inhale?

By Ami Ben-Dod

(translated by Green Leaf Party activists) 

According to the chief of police’s new plan, users or consumers of drugs for personal use will not be prosecuted. “Focus on the dealers and not the consumers.” Cohen told the cops. The drug users in Israel will enjoy relative peace: the General Inspector of the Israel Police, Dudi Cohen, is promoting a new policy which states that the investment of the police in the enforcement area, will focus on the suppliers and smugglers and not on the consumers. “We’re not talking about the legalization of drugs,” the police clarified, as they will continue to document every user caught, even if they do not intend to press charges.  

“The General Inspector prefers to dry up the swamp instead of killing the mosquitoes one at a time,” explained yesterday a senior officer in Intelligence and Investigations, the department which Cohen leads. “The system’s new attitude toward users won’t affect the popular drug use trends. Traditionally, when we stopped a student we caught for a first-time offense, he’d be delayed, brought to the station in a police car and would wait to be dealt with until a police officer was available to process his case; he’d endure a long interrogation and finally we’d look for a responsible party to come bail him out. The result was almost an entire day of police work dedicated to a file that would almost never lead to an indictment.” 

The officer adds that police opened 16,371 files on drug use last year alone. This shows the incredible investment of energy dedicated to skimming the surface, without ever delving the roots of the problem ? the dealers and the smugglers. He claims that this useless investment of time leads to a flood of one-off casework for prosecutors, cases which often wait for years before coming to a conclusion. While police are still working on integrating this new policy,  one of the possibilities they’re looking into is questioning users on who their suppliers’ identity. 

Personal Use is Defined As: 

Grass                15 grams
Hash                 15 grams
Opium               2 grams
LSD                   3 stamps
Ecstasy             3 pills
Cocaine             0.3 grams
Heroin               0.3 grams 

8,832 files opened on drug dealers 

The goal - sealing the Israel/Jordan border from smuggling 

“For most of those caught for the first-time, any contact with the police creates fear, explained the officer. When it comes to someone who’s not a first-time offender, but that this is his way of life, we will prosecute him to the full extent of the law because he might drive under the influence or steals to pay for his drug use.” With all this, the police underscored that there is no drug legalization happening, but merely a shifting of the threat of police attention to the market wholesalers. This policy will be implemented, for its trial run, by the police responsible for juvenile delinquency; this team is strictly filing warnings for first-time offenders. During legal investigations, second-time or multiple offenders will go on permanent record as criminals and this record will not be expunged.  

As part of the police struggle in the war on drugs, including the new guiding policies from the station level to the national drug enforcement units, there are also plans for a new unit for the Negev region, dealing with sealing the Israel/Jordan border, which is today the major drug terminal for heroin coming in from Asia, through Turkey and hash from Afghanistan, constituting a sort of border invasion. In addition, the Yagal Unit, patrolling the Lebanese border, will be reformed, to prevent drug smuggling from Lebanon, mostly hash and heroin from eastern Asia and the Lebanese Valley and cocaine from South America.