Part 5: The Cannabis Liberation Festival

“OMG Frieda, I can’t believe it! It’s Lory from Cannabis Commerce, immortalizing us with his lens!”

I’d barely shot any useable video in Amsterdam. And I hadn’t come up with much to gush about here. But I’d be spending the last day of the trip at the Cannabis Liberation Day Festival … and hope springs eternal. Posters advertising it were plastered on every kiosk in the country. A similarly well-publicized event, a Queen’s Day pop concert, had just drawn 300,000 revelers. So, how could I miss at a gathering called the Cannabis Liberation Day Festival in a country that’s been the most cannabis-friendly country on earth for the past forty years?

Let me count the ways.

In three letters or less, The Cannabis Liberation Day Festival was a dud. In six letters or less, it was a Big Dud.

Posters advertising the Cannabis Liberation Day Festival were plastered on every kiosk in “Holland.” Note the intention: “SAVE OUR CANNABIS CULTURE.”

Held on a bright spring day in Westemere Park, the festival was supposed to unite the NL’s herbal rights activists, bringing them all together, the better to stand up to the Christian Democrat party and its dastardly desire — to stamp out cannabis in the NL altogether.

The sparsely attended event was a huge letdown in every respect. The video and photos show a few nomadic clusters of skinheads amongst huge expanses of lawn devoid of man, dog, or bong. Suffice it to say exhilaration was not in the air.

The anticipated cast of thousands never materialized.

The poor turnout contributed to the energy void evident in the video, the photos, and my dispirited prose.

This monumental display of apathy implied something deeply disturbing — hardly anyone in the NL was willing to stand up for cannabis when the maligned plant needed human help the most.

The turnout was a shadow of what could have been.

Just incredibly disappointing.

Completely unexpected.

No picnic to write about.

Fellow global legalization activists, we have our work cut out for us! The conversion which can and must take place will be an even more enormous undertaking than I originally thought. But, hey, now at least we know.

Discriminating Dutch stoners match their accessories to their outfits.

Compare the uninspiring Amsterdam video with this one — 420@CUBoulder. Ray Charles could have shot great footage at an event like that.

Fortunately, for all its faults, at least the video illustrates one of the NL’s big advantages over the USA: not only can you smoke on site in coffee houses, you can smoke in public. If you’re a vendor selling, say, gigantic glass bongs at outdoor festivals, potential customers don’t have to imagine what it’s like to smoke something tasty out of one. You can load it up with primo Cannabis Cup winning buds. Kinda stacks the odds a little more in your favor, don’t you think?

Even these Holland honeys from Den Haag call pot a “soft drug.”

I got to hear some of those queer eurobeats I mentioned in this series’ introduction. Hopefully you like cute eurobeats, because in Holland, if it isn’t dance music, and it attempts to slot itself into the “rock” oeuvre, it doesn’t travel very well. Will “Hocus Pocus” by Focus remain forever The Netherlands’ boldest foray into rock lore?

I better explain my infatuation with Focus. I fell into being a roadie for them for one fun-filled week at the height of their fame when I last visited Holland, in the 70’s. Back then, coffee shops were way more of a fantasy world than they are now, with name bands, munchies that put Oreos to shame, and smoke that was way more lethal than anything you could obtain in the US at the time unless you held diplomatic immunity [like my college roommate at American University in 1969, son of the Venezuelan ambassador].

Queer eurobeats, anyone?

Incidentally, I didn’t see any police presence at the festival whatsoever.

I’ll bite.

All I can tell you is that when I was in the coffee shop district, or at the festival, my initial excitement quickly gave way to the feeling I didn’t really want to be there. I didn’t stay long at either.

Meanwhile, the average citizens of Amsterdam were making it crystal clear they’re way more down on cannabis than cannabis-averse Americans. Almost everyone labels the innocent herb a “drug.” That includes attendees at the Cannabis Liberation Festival, although they tempered it by using the term, “soft drug.” Cruising around the festival, I could see why the general NL populace was so down on weed — almost everyone had a spliff in one hand and a Heineken in the other. And there were a lot more Heinekens where those came from.

Previously, I couldn’t understand why the average citizen has a hard time imagining anyone using cannabis in moderation. Now I knew. Nobody uses cannabis in moderation. The participants at the festival simply had a harder edge to them than the folks at, say, 420@CUBoulder.

Not all gorgeous Dutch women are blonde. Previously, the only person of African descent who had appeared in Cannabis Commerce was Martin Luther King. That number has now tripled.

All this was really eye-opening.

Once I get over the initial shock and go into analytic mode, I’ll prepare and post the concluding segment. The two best-known cannacultures will be compared and contrasted.

I may even throw in suggestions for elevating the planet via cannavision.