It clearly annoyed him when I asked about the coffeeshops. His face contorted in irritation and he heaved a weary sigh. “Why is that the first thing people ask when they come here? ‘Where are the coffeeshops?’ Why? Don’t they know that Amsterdam is much more than sex and cannabis?”
While it’s a bit like someone from the Bahamas complaining that tourists only want to go to the beach and drink rum, this concern about the world’s perception of the city is common for native Amsterdammers.
“You can’t blame the tourists. Amsterdam has the best cannabis in the world,” I told him.
This, apparently, was news to Joop.
“Really?”
I pointed out that millions of seeds and hundreds of thousands of kilos of nederwiet—Dutch-grown cannabis—are exported out of Holland every year. He considered that fact and, although he tried to hide it behind his sandwich, I detected a hint of pride.
We were interrupted by another writer, Minka, who joined us at the communal table. I watched as she carefully buttered her brown bread and dumped a pile of chocolate sprinkles called muisjes—little mice—on top. She spread the sprinkles carefully with a knife. I couldn’t help staring. It’s not often you see an adult eating a chocolate sprinkle sandwich for lunch.
Joop continued. “In 1996, we had a purple parliament.”
“What?”
“The socialists were red, the liberal democrats blue. They formed a coalition government.”
So it was not, as I had hoped, a government inspired by the pop star Prince.
“But the liberals here are not like liberals in the United States. Here they are more like libertarians. They don’t want people telling them how to live.”
Like the prostitutes in the red-light district, coffeeshops had been operating illegally, but without any serious enforcement, since the late ’70s. There was never any formal regulation in place.
“The purple parliament licensed the coffeeshops and legalized gay marriage, euthanasia, prostitution—all the social reforms that we have now.”
I watched Joop take a bite out of his liverwurst and then turned to see Minka chewing a big bite of chocolate sprinkle sandwich. It was one of the most iconoclastic lunches I’d ever attended. Maybe that’s typically Dutch.
But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing for Dutch tolerance. In fact, things are changing. According to Joop, a few recent events have shaken Dutch society and are making them reconsider how far tolerance can actually be extended.
After the attacks in New York City on September 11, 2001, a flamboyant, openly gay, and, for the Netherlands, right-wing politician named Pim Fortuyn declared that the purple parliament had made a mess of the country. He started his own political party—the eponymic Pim Fortuyn List—and ran a popular campaign to limit immigration and stop the multiculturalism that he felt was eroding traditional Dutch culture. In 2002, he was assassinated by a disgruntled animal-rights activist and vegan who felt that Fortuyn was picking on “weaker groups in society.”
I looked at Joop and raised an eyebrow.
“A homicidal vegan?”
Joop shrugged. “We’re talking about Holland.”
The assassination of Pym Fortuyn was followed by the murder of filmmaker and writer Theo van Gogh in 2004. A Dutch-Moroccan man outraged by a film Van Gogh made depicting the deplorable treatment of women in Islamic countries shot him eight times—and then attempted to decapitate him with a knife—as he bicycled to work. For many Dutch citizens, this had as big an emotional impact as the 9/11 terrorist attacks had on the United States, and the traditionally tolerant Dutch public began to actively question their policy of openness.
These events gave rise to Geert Wilders, a right-wing politician who looks a lot like Siegfried or Roy, and is a virulent anti-Islamist who supports a moratorium on immigration from Muslim nations, a ban on the building of mosques in Holland, and a ban on traditional Muslim clothing like the burka. His logic is simple: Holland, he says, cannot afford to “tolerate the intolerant.” Wilders flatly claims that if the Muslim population in Holland continues to grow and manages to force their intolerant views into Dutch political life, Amsterdam will no longer be the “gay capital of Europe.”
I can’t imagine an American politician, Democrat or Republican, seeking to ban immigrants to protect a culture of tolerance, gay rights, cannabis, and the other social freedoms that are taken for granted in Dutch society. In fact, FOX News television personality Bill O’Reilly famously claimed in 2008 that the Netherlands exemplified “extreme liberalism” and had become a “cesspool of corruption” caught in the “grips of anarchy.”
Which is a load of horse shit. I don’t see any evidence of anarchy or even intolerance. If anything, the Netherlands is, like a lot of societies, struggling to adapt to globalism and a changing world, only they’re being a little more thoughtful about it.
Joop polished off his liverwurst sandwich and chased it with a glass of strawberry juice. Minka got up to go back to work, leaving a scattering of chocolate sprinkles on the table that I was tempted to eat. Joop wiped his lips with a napkin and got up to make some coffee.
“I don’t see this as Islam versus the West or any kind of religious schism. That won’t be the culture war.”
“What is it then?”
Joop smiled as dark espresso bubbled out of the coffee maker.
“I think it’s sovereignty versus cosmopolitanism.”
I admit, I had to think about this for a minute. Cosmopolitanism is the belief that all humans share a similar underlying morality—we all want to be happy, to be free from suffering, and so forth—and that we belong to a community of humanity. It’s a worldview that is inclusive, yet allows for individuals to have different opinions and lifestyles, and fits nicely with the “one love” ideology of the stoner set. Sovereignty, by contrast, is about excluding people who are “different.” It’s a kind of narrow-minded and arrogant tribalism.
I like that the Dutch do things their way. It’s a society that values rebelliousness and tolerance. People are given license to be idiosyncratic and unique and live their lives the way they want to. It’s a simple yet profound idea and it seems to work. It’s a sharp contrast to the United States, which claims to be “the land of the free” and yet denies its citizens basic liberties like the right to marry who they want or the freedom to ingest nontoxic plants in the privacy of their own home. Yet not all Dutch people are for this quasi-legal soft drug policy. In fact, the country is split pretty evenly, with some Dutch politicians arguing for the closing of the coffeeshops, or limiting the sale of cannabis to Dutch citizens, while many, like Amsterdam’s current mayor Job Cohen, are supportive of the industry.
Back at Grey Area, I asked Jon Foster about this and he shrugged.
“Every few years when there’s an election, someone talks about shutting down the shops and then after the election that talk kinda goes away.”
I explained that what struck me as funny—in an ironic way—was the part of the law that proclaims it is “an offense to produce, possess, sell, import or export drugs.” In other words, coffeeshops can sell small amounts of cannabis but it’s illegal for growers to grow the weed or importers to bring it in to the country. And yet Dutch-grown cannabis and Moroccan hash are the big sellers on every coffeeshop menu in Amsterdam.
Jon laughed. “Yeah. It’s weird.”
Coffeeshops exist in a wacky twist of legal logic, a kind of gray area—hence the name of Jon’s shop.
I asked Jon how he selects the weed he carries. He’s got a network of small, artisanal growers bringing their product into the shop, but it can’t all be dank. What does he look for?
Jon lifted his cap and ran his hand across his head.
“We would look for crystals and if the plant looked like it had been grown well. Obviously if it looks pretty it’s easier to sell than if it looks all scraggly. And then how it’s dried. If the stems snap. And we’d want to make sure it wasn’t too dry. A lot of people try to quic
k dry or flash dry the herb and it just breaks into dust.”
He shook his head sadly and a look passed across his face that seemed to say it all. Why can’t people just be patient? Then he continued.
“We smell for the aroma. We look for a clean, fruity smell. Sometimes there’s a smell that’s almost like fish because they use fish meal fertilizer. That’s undesirable, for sure.”
It sounded disgusting.
“And then we usually have to smoke it—which is the best test.”
I’m not a cannabis connoisseur. In fact, I’m hopeless. I can’t tell the difference between sativa and indica until after I’ve smoked it and I either get high—which I like—or get stoned and sleepy—which I don’t like so much. I can’t really tell if the bud has been cured properly, and I can’t detect fertilizers or chemicals or fish meal in the taste of the smoke. Well, maybe I could taste the fish meal. I’d like to think I could.
Over the course of a few visits to Grey Area I sampled a number of the strains on the menu. The one thing that stuck out was that they were noticeably stronger than the strains I’d smoked at other coffeeshops. I told Jon how the Silver Bubble—a cross between Super Silver Haze and Bubblegum—kicked my ass. And by that I mean I had to go back to my apartment, lie down, and go to sleep.
He laughed. “I’m not surprised.”
For me, that experience wasn’t dank. It was like being abducted.
To make up for the Silver Bubble experience, Jon rolled me a joint of something called Grey Haze, which I took back to my apartment and smoked. This cannabis was strong—it gave me the “up” feeling I liked—and it had the unusual side effect of stopping time. I know that sounds like an outrageous claim, but it’s true. I had a couple of hits off the joint. I didn’t want to smoke too much because I’d agreed to meet someone for dinner and had about a half hour before I needed to leave. I checked the time: It was four thirty in the afternoon. With the Grey Haze rattling around in my brain and some time to kill, I began to clean up the apartment. I swept the floor, did the dishes in the sink, folded some laundry, got dressed, brushed my teeth, checked my emails, and drank a glass of mineral water. Then I lay down on the bed for what seemed like a half hour and, thinking I was late, jumped up and checked the clock. It was four thirty-four.
Grey Haze wasn’t dank, but it did freak me out.
It seemed to me that dankness was more complicated than I first thought. If what Jon said was true, dankness begins with the genetics of the plant, then the care taken in growing and drying it is factored in, and finally there are the “situational elements.” That seemed to me like a chain of unrelated incidents.
There are too many variables. You can’t always control the where and how and who and when you smoke pot. It’s not always with your lover in a friendly coffeeshop on a nice day in a charming European city. The growing and drying process can be controlled to a large degree, but that requires effort and constant vigilance. And you have to trust that the farmer didn’t use herbicides or pesticides that could still be in the plant. Nobody wants to smoke bug spray. But can you control a plant’s genetics? And if you can control it, can you breed a plant to be dank?
I realized that I needed to start at the beginning. I needed to take a class in basic botany.
Chapter Six
Botany 101
It’s Koninginnedag, Queen’s Day, and people all over the city are emptying out their closets and attics, piling their crap on the street in the hopes that someone will actually buy it. This is because the Dutch government has declared Queen’s Day a vrijmarkt, or “free market,” so if someone is actually able to unload an old crib, that broken bicycle, or those golf clubs that have been rusting in the trunk of their Renault for the last seven years, the government won’t charge a tax. The holiday is all about national unity, and nothing brings a nation together better than a good old-fashioned duty-free yard sale.
And, of course, beer.
And wearing the color orange, apparently.
I strolled up Utrechtsestraat to Rembrandtplein—a plaza I remember as the location of a restaurant where I suffered through a terrible Indonesian rijsttafel—an elaborate succession of a dozen or so disappointing and underspiced dishes slowly burning over small candles—and made my way up a street called Rokin. I passed the Royal Palace where a cluster of soldiers from the Royal Netherlands Army stood around looking spiffy in combat fatigues and berets while workers unloaded metal gates to create a protective barrier for the queen. This security was not unjustified.
In 2009, a recently fired security guard named Karst Tates drove his black Suzuki Swift at high speed through a crowd in an attempt to collide with an open-topped bus carrying the royal family. Paradoxically described as a “nice quiet fellow” and someone with “strong right-wing views,” but not as a particularly good driver, he missed the bus and slammed into a concrete monument. Eight people, including Tates himself, died in the attack.
I left the main street and cut through some of the smaller side streets of the Amsterdam Centrum. These were narrow passageways lined with small bars, cramped restaurants, and, of course, coffeeshops where marijuana and hashish are consumed.
Outside of one coffeeshop, as the sweet, skunky smell of cannabis mixed with the scent of incense, causing my nose to go into a patchouli-overdrive sneeze, I passed a very stoned French girl standing next to a bicycle. She had a huge grin plastered on her face like some kind of maniac, and was waving excitedly to her friends, jumping up and down, as she rang the bike’s bell over and over again.
It did have a pleasing tone.
I got turned around, an easy thing to do in a city where the streets run in long, looping U-shaped curves, and found myself in De Wallen, Amsterdam’s famous red-light district. It’s a major tourist attraction, like Disneyland, only with different kinds of rides.
Unlike pot smoking, which is technically illegal, paying someone for sex is a completely legitimate transaction in Amsterdam. I strolled through the alleyways lined with glass doors and windows where prostitutes stood, hands on hips, like lingerie-clad cuts in a butcher shop. The afternoon shift was just starting. While a few windows displayed women who looked to be from eastern Europe—not that I know, but they looked a little bit like Ivana Trump—the majority appeared to be from Africa, with squat and stocky bodies that looked powerful, as if they were recruited from the Ghanaian Olympic weightlifting team. Their flesh spilled out of what little they wore, like Sumo wrestlers stuffed into bikinis. They reminded me of the actor Yaphet Kotto, if you can imagine Yaphet Kotto in a pink pageboy wig and lacy lingerie.
Considering they were standing in the glass doors and windows to entice men inside, their expressions were not what I would call inviting. There was no come-hither bat of the eyes. They didn’t purse their lips or beckon customers with a twitch of their fingers or a heave of their breasts. Instead they looked like office workers everywhere, stuck in a cubicle trying to make a buck—which is not to say they aren’t good at their jobs. I imagine in a competitive business like whoring you can’t just phone it in; you need to have skills.
De Wallen also boasts a number of sex shops, sex clubs, bars, and, of course, coffeeshops. At one porno video store a handwritten sign in the window advertised “Half Off All Animal DVDs.”
I eventually made my way to a quiet street called Sint Nicolaasstraat, stepped over a massive rain puddle, and walked into the DNA Genetics store.
Rafaela, an attractive young woman with beautifully rendered tattoos randomly splashed across her body, sat behind the front counter and leaned over a white porcelain dish with an expression of absolute concentration on her face. She looked up and smiled at me before tucking a strand of dark brown hair behind her ear and turning back to her work. The dish contained a pile of tiny cannabis seeds, and it was Raf’s job to separate the seeds from the bits of dried leaves and stems, inspecting them closely to make sure none were cracked or damaged, and then package them in small plastic bags. The work looked tedious, eve
n migraine inducing, but she took to the task with good humor. It’s just part of the behind-the-scenes glamour of working in the cannabis business.
She funneled some seeds into a plastic bag about the size of a shirt pocket. I was curious how many seeds were in the bag; I would’ve guessed five hundred, maybe a few more, but she surprised me.
“Maybe, I guess, seven thousand.”
Aaron, the “A” of DNA Genetics, emerged from the back wearing a slime-spattered T-shirt and holding a garden hose. Aaron is one of the foremost strain developers in the world, famous in the field of cannabis genetics, but instead of the hipster scientist I was expecting, he looked like a plumber in the middle of snaking a badly clogged toilet. He apologized and said he was changing the water in the massive fish tank that takes up half the back wall of the store. As the water level in the tank dropped, a large mud-colored carplike fish looked out with an expression of aquatic anxiety.
Aaron’s a good-looking dude with close-cropped hair and a lean and lanky physique that reflects his years of playing varsity soccer and baseball. He’s friendly, with a quick smile and intelligent eyes, but there’s a distinct South Central swagger, an authentic don’t fuck with me undertone that comes from growing up in certain parts of Los Angeles. In other words: He has the potential to mad dog on a dime. It’s easy to see why he’s probably the only strain developer in the world who’s a member of the Screen Actors Guild. In his early days in Hollywood he had a brief career portraying long-haired drug dealers on various TV shows. His cinematic specialty, he says, was “running from the police.”
By contrast, Don, the “D” of DNA Genetics, exudes an affable, doughy charm. He’s got a wry sense of humor and is quick to stroke his chin and chuckle with Dalai Lama–esque amusement at the world.
Heart of Dankness Page 5