Part 2: Leeuwarden
The Repelsteeljte: have a coffee with your cannabis right on the premises. Meet your friends. Listen to hip music, converse with offbeat humanoids, enjoy the mellow Euro atmosphere. If this was my neighborhood bar, I’d be in heaven !
Three hours by train from Amsterdam, The Repelsteeltje is a picturesque coffee shop hidden away on the cobblestoned backstreets of Leeuwarden. My expedition to document cannabis culture in the land of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and 70’s rock gods Focus had the good fortune to begin there.
Budtender Menno had no problem with me filming cinema verité. He gave us the lowdown on marijuana in a monarchy — yes, The Netherlands has a Queen, Beatrix. She’s popular with her subjects, who drive up her approval rating by drinking themselves silly on Queen’s Day. Remarkably, Her Majesty and I would cross paths shortly thereafter.
Will Beatrix, Queen of Cannabis, abdicate her throne?
Menno’s first startling revelation was the disclosure that cannabis is entirely illegal in NL.
You can’t grow it, buy it, or sell it.
Let me repeat that: you can’t buy it, grow it, or sell it. Yet I was looking right at Exhibits A–Z of the same ingeniously titled strains I was accustomed to viewing in The Mile High City. Which brings us to Menno’s second startling revelation: since regular folks are forbidden to grow, irregular folks — read organized crime — have stepped in to fill the void. They call that “the back door problem.”
Legal or illegal, regular or irregular, ten minutes later, I had purchased a tasty pre-roll … and was soon consuming it to my great delight on the Repelsteeltje’s second floor where I luxuriated on a comfy Eurocouch and kicked back to the Miles-Davis-goes-acid rock soundtrack playing through the house system: dozens of Alesis studio monitors hung in every nook and cranny of the three-story chill center erected circa 1649.
Clearly the US hasn’t cornered the market on hypocrisy. “You can’t buy it, grow it, or sell it but here it is” is a textbook example by anyone’s standards.
When no one came to take me away, I grew more brazen, dancing with the local talent. I want to take this opportunity to assure readers:
- I was just being thorough in my research.
- No possible personal pleasure was involved.
- I remained detached from my subject — even as I was attached to my subject.
That’s how dedicated I am.
Back in the bud bar I found myself deep in conversation with Ono, a 22-year-old Environmental Sciences student fond of flexing his English vocabulary. Ono peppered his philosophical discourses on far-reaching subjects with vivid phrases like “you can cross out raw mutations and go on to permutations.”
Maybe Repelsteeltje means “existentialism with a nice ring to it.” Either that or cannabis science is so advanced in the NL that THC submolecules have been tweaked to transform anyone in a coffee shop into Jean-Paul Sartre.
Hours later, after I’d exhausted the personal growth opportunities at the Repelsteeltje, I was curious what sort of delicacies and verbal bon mots another must-see Leeuwarden coffee shop had to offer.
But first I had to find it. I negotiated canals and narrow alleyways until I eventually located De Os coffee shop. I introduced myself. At first, management was suspicious. Could I be a CIA operative sent to spy on their operation, an understandable concern? I gave the manager the URL for cannabiscommerce.org. While he went to check that out, I was free to film their inviting establishment. Products on display seemed similar in quality and pricing to what’s available in my South Denver hood.
However, unlike anything I or anyone else in the US is used to, De Os provided a row of internet terminals and a separate smoke-it-on-site room the locals were putting to good use. Civilized.
It turned out De Os shared a wall and ownership with Maya, a hemp products shop I’d heard about that I wanted to video. Since everyone I asked had declined to be interviewed at De Os, I walked around the building to Maya’s alluring front entrance and strolled in. Ah … by then the manager had sniffed out cannabiscommerce.org — and now he and the rest of the staff had a lot to say!
Manager Mark was animated and thoughtful. It was great hearing his take on hemp — which is legal, anyone can grow as much of it as they want. Then we got into the political situation and the acceptance level of the locals (I’m getting to that; prepare yourself for the sound of illusions shattering).
Get on your bad motorscooter ‘n ride — to Maya for all your hemp needs. You can grow all the hemp you want in the NL.
There was a magic moment when I showed Maya’s management and patrons Cannabis Commerce’s footage of 420@CUBoulder on the house flatscreen. I should mention that prior to the impromptu screening, I’d tried some of their finest White Widow — which would have been impolite to refuse (like they really had to twist my arm). I regret that I wasn’t present enough to capture the mouth-open reaction shots there for the taking.
When the video showed 25,000 “stoners” lighting up at precisely 4:20 PM, the Mayans could scarcely believe their eyes. They had no idea impassioned demonstrations like that were taking place in our Rocky Mountain stronghold.
Once I got past some initial scepticism, this turned into another great stop. I was positive the cannabis tourism was just warming up. If the modernized medieval village foreshadowed things to come, I was prepared to be blown away by the sights and sounds of Amsterdam, particularly the forthcoming Cannabis Liberation Day Festival. Posters advertising the big event were splashed all over Leeuwarden, leading me to believe that the festival would be the grand finale of my short-but-sweet sojourn which had, so far, only underlined speculation that the grass was definitely greener in the NL.
That said, as much as I enjoyed the slices of life at the Repelsteeltje and De Os/Maya, as I ventured out and about amongst the townsfolk of Leeuwarden there were a few inklings that something was amiss. I began encountering a distressing undercurrent.
Initially, friends of friends were very warm. I went out of my way to show that I wasn’t an “ugly American” by freely admitted my disconnect with the Bin Laden assassination, an embarrassing reality show which aired while I was there, and for the fact that our Special Forces operate in 75 countries (watching drone planes take out your neighbor’s hut by mistake has to be considered “special” on some level).
It was all valentines and roses until the conversation turned to what I do for a living. When I replied that I write about cannabis . . . whoa! That really put them off. End of conversation. The same restaurant owner who had moments ago personally steamed me a free cappuccino as a gesture of international goodwill couldn’t wait for me to leave.
The first time this happened, I chalked it up to an anomaly. But then it became a pattern.
The few people I run into in the states who are against legalization are actually much more tolerant of my position than the NL natives I encountered. That was kind of stunning. It was the first sign “Holland” might not be the Weedworld we imagine from afar.
I couldn’t figure out why there was so much anti-cannabis sentiment in a country we’re conditioned to believe is all about weed.
Then again, maybe anti-cannabis prejudice just existed in provincial burgs like Leeuwarden. I’d learn more as my whirlwind tour, headed next to bustling Amsterdam (cue music: The Scorpions, “Big City Lights”), continued. Surely, the prevailing attitude was entirely different in the big city?
http://youtu.be/6hrUlXb86gk
