This morning, employees of Amsterdam's de Dampkring ("the Smoke Ring") coffee-shop franchise have convened at the unbohemian hour of 9 a.m. for a daylong refresher course on the finer points of effective and responsible weed salesmanship. Not long from now, I'm scheduled to spend a week behind the hash bar at one of de Dampkring's two local branches, but what I know about the art of marijuana retail–not to mention Holland's perverse and hazy drug statutes–wouldn't fill a golf-ball dimple. So at the request of the shops' rightly nervous manager, I've crossed the pond early to undergo a spot of preprofessional cramming.
The seminar is taking place on the second floor of the Dampkring's forward-looking modern branch, whose decor tends toward diamond plate and brushed steel, in deliberate disdain, the owner tells me, for the hippy-shit aesthetics, smoke-browned Hendrix posters, and Jamaican tricolor of the last-gen Amsterdam dope joint. Despite the ineradicable skunk's-tail perfume leaching from the Sheetrock, the shop this morning is a pretty faithful imitation of a high school classroom–from the distracted bespectacled lecturer (a representative from a nonprofit drug-counseling agency) futzing with the overhead projector to the two icily pretty cheerleader types giggling in malicious-sounding Dutch while stocking their desktops with schoolgirl tackle (moisturizer, makeup, chocolates, tissue packets) to the rearmost dunce row, where I've been quarantined with my translator, who told me to call him Harry Resin. A merry Canadian in his midthirties who has lived in Amsterdam for the past decade or so, Harry was drafted into translation detail by Dampkring management and is not delighted about it. "I haven't been up this early in years," he says.
Harry, who formerly ran a seed business and now spends his days as a cannabis-policy gadfly, is also unhappy because we're forbidden to get high during class. On a typical day, Harry likes to spark a joint the size of a cornucopia shortly after getting out of bed and to spark another one every fifteen minutes or so until it's time to go to sleep at night. By his own account, Harry smokes ten to fourteen ounces per month (in the neighborhood of $5,000 worth if he were paying retail, which he does not). So, thwarted for the next few hours, Harry impatiently rolls one hefty spliff of G13-Amnesia Haze after another, lining them up on his desk in anticipation of the noontime lunch break.
Our instructor opens the session with the gentle question "How does it feel to work in a coffee shop?" Contrary to my conception of Holland as a freethinking sort of nation where it's no more fraught to suck a public bongload than an after-dinner mint, a number of people confess feeling a sense of vague disgrace at working in the industry.
"I guess I'm sort of a source of shame for my family," says one dealer (as the hash-bar staffers are known).
"I don't tell people," says a cheerleader. "I just say I work in hospitality."
"I say the same thing," offers Dampkring owner Paul Wilhelm, whose unflagging smirk and mirthfully squinted eyes give him the look of a man trapped in a mild and hilarious g-force machine. "It used to be cannabis was nothing; it was spinach. These days, if you say you own a coffee shop, people think you're a criminal."
Despite the smoggy lamentations of American stoners–"Man, why can't we just be cool about weed like the Dutch?"–Dutch industry pros increasingly despair of Holland's cannabis status quo and look with envy at the situation in the United States. With pot decriminalized in thirteen states and medical marijuana metastasizing onto ballot measures nationwide, America's cannabis policy is reaching a tipping point. Weed advocates on both sides of the Atlantic are hoping we'll craft something smarter and more durable than the jerry-rigged system reigning in Holland. While part of my reason for coming to Amsterdam was to get a glimpse of what may become America's newest retail sector, after a conversation or two with people here, Holland looks less like a blueprint for America's pending cannabis legislation and more a cautionary exhibit of mistakes we shouldn't make.
Marijuana and establishments that sell it remain illegal in Holland, but the industry operates more or less in plain sight through a statutory gray area known as gedoogbeleid, roughly "tolerance." The tolerance policy protects smokers possessing five grams or less but cuts local government plenty of prosecutorial slack to harry shop owners at the first shift of Holland's culture wars. The national statutes are sufficiently loose and leaky that almost forty years after the first coffee shop opened its doors, the center-right Christian Democratic Appeal–until recently Holland's ruling party–has pledged to shutter every hash bar on Dutch soil. And while coffee shops operate at the pleasure of city government, not national parties like the CDA, Holland's dope outlets have undergone a substantial die-off of late. In 1997, at least 1,019 coffee shops were doing business in the Netherlands. But after a quiet epidemic of denied shop-license renewals and selective enforcement of gedoogbeleid's caprices, today's number is closer to 700. Rotterdam alone closed a third of its shops in 2008. These are anxious times in the dope trade, which is why, through voluntary measures like today's clinic, shop owners are doing all they can to stay on the good side of the law.
So here in the dunce row, determined to be the most upstanding dope dealer I can possibly be, I'm jotting notes at a stenographic rate. The lecturer is just now getting into the most crucial leg of his spiel, the five unbending commandments of pot commerce: Coffee shops are forbidden to advertise, to sell to persons under 18, to cause a public nuisance, to sell hard drugs, or to maintain an inventory of more than 500 grams (about 17.6 ounces). Breaking any of these could result in fines, closure, or a prison term.
But as he starts detailing in Dutch some of the subtler particulars of the law, it suddenly becomes very tough to follow the lecture, because one of the cheerleaders in the next row has turned in her seat to call my translator's attention to something important: In the second-story window across the street, we can plainly see a large television screening video footage of someone's bottom getting quite seriously poked by a vast empurpled dong. Scholarship titters to a halt in our part of the room. And now, Jason den Enting, Dampkring's fearsome manager, comes over to see what the problem is, and Harry Resin giggles and gestures helplessly at the window. "It's really distracting," he pleads.
Jason, a tall, gruff man whose shaved pate and brusque manner lend him the air of a scarcely rehabilitated skinhead, scowls at the vista for a moment. "Anal!" he barks, affronted. But shortly, a heavyset woman with a badass matronly look enters the apartment across the street. The television hurriedly goes dark, and study recommences.
Midafternoon, training day concludes with a role-play customer-service practicum in which we're to pair up and rehearse the proper etiquette for ejecting minors from the shop. To my great chagrin, Jason den Enting, wary perhaps that my ineptitude behind the bar might provoke a visit from the vice squad, selects me as his partner.
"Okay," he says, "I'm a 15-year-old girl getting high on your shift. Kick me out."
"Um, hi," I say, my fingers tented tremblingly at my chest. "Can I see some ID, ma'am?"
Jason duly refuses. I repeat the petition. He waves me off, at which point I say in a shrill, Nellie voice, "Well, fine, then I guess I'll just have to call the police!"
Jason bursts into scornful laughter, pointing out that, given municipal contempt for coffee shops, I'd have about as much luck summoning the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders as the Amsterdam P.D. We do a few disastrous retakes, in which I'm again somehow unable to refrain from hysterical threats to call the law. Finally, Jason gives up, shaking his head in weary resignation, but nevertheless lets me receive a diploma certifying my status as a credentialed dope peddler.
"I would kill to have your job" is a sentiment I'll hear from tourists by the dozen during my week behind the Dampkring bar, though in fact I anticipate the exercise with cold anxiety. Part of the job, I've already been told, will involve smoking weed in quantity, and marijuana and I do not make a happy team. "Paranoia" doesn't adequately get at what I suffer while I'm high. It's more like Ebola of the superego, a self-loathing catatonia of uncertainty and dread. When I'm stoned, Homo sapiens and its customs become terrifying and obscure. Shortly after the first good toke, I can almost hear a delicate shardwork of baffling human etiquette crystallizing in the air around me, making it impossible to so much as reach for a Cheeto without causing an apocalypse.
That said, I managed to sustain a fairly heavy habit during junior high school in North Carolina, mostly to spook my folks. But that was back in the mid-'80s, when all we could get our hands on was seed-studded ditch weed you could smoke by the bale and still not be sure whether you were actually stoned or if you'd just stood up too quick. At college in Connecticut, I had my first woeful exposure to connoisseur-grade ganja, hydroponic sinsemilla a friend brought up from Miami. I knew I was high when I smoked that stuff, because suddenly the Pearl Jam CD somebody had put on would seem not just derivative and mediocre but proof that we were stupid, mediocre people for listening to it. Then I'd leap to the revelation that I hated my friends and that they hated me, at which point I would usually projectile-vomit into the wastebasket while one of my hateful pals held back the tresses of my Eddie Vedder hairdo. The barfing response happened reliably enough that for the decade after college, I stopped smoking pot altogether. Every now and again I give it another shot, taking homeopathic doses late at night in the solitude of my own home. But in the morning, I'll find unpleasant notes ("400 crunches now, you pudgy fuck!") taped to the mirror where I spent an hour the previous evening appalling myself with the sight of my nude body. Generally I leave the stuff alone.
That's all to say that when Jason den *Enting hands me an assortment of six or seven strains as "homework" for my first day on the job, it's not an assignment I greet with unalloyed relish. But being a responsible journalist, I take the garden basket to a dozy-looking coffee shop with the intention of jotting taster's notes to relay to my customers. At 36, I'm still incapable of rolling a joint and too self-conscious to ask to borrow the house bong. So what I do is roll a few frail taco-like objects, set them messily afire, and hoover after the smoke with grasping lips.
When Jason asks me before my first shift, "So, you did your homework? You know your way around the menu?" I say, "Oh, sure." But what really happened during my tasting session was that I got very worried that someone in the coffee shop might try to talk to me, so I sprinted back to my hotel and stood in front of the elevator for thirty terrified seconds, praying that I wouldn't have to cope with the desk clerk bidding me good evening. At last I made it to the third floor and was so relieved to reach the sanctuary of my room that I spent twenty minutes moonwalking the carpet and singing Andy Gibb's "I Just Want to Be Your Everything" before collapsing on the bed, where I lay awake until dawn, quaking with the conviction that every decision I've made since birth has been corrupt, selfish, and wrong.
At quarter of nine on a Wednesday morning, I report for my first shift. I'll be working at de Dampkring on the Handboogstraat, a cheery alley just off the Damstraat, a heavily touristed promenade connecting the Flower Market to Dam Square. The Handboogstraat shop, a cozy enclave that can comfortably seat thirty or so, is a study in Art Nouveau psychedelia. Lava-lamp swirls predominate. The coffee bar is nearly overwhelmed by a biomorphic plaster mass aglow with party bulbs. The shop is pleasant and trippy in a somehow classic fashion. It's like being inside the lovely bowels of Toulouse-Lautrec.
The hash (or "stuff") bar lies at the room's rear, past the beverage counter. Today I'll be manning the bar with Romain, a young blond fellow with vaguely Asiatic eyes who emanates Holland's national mien of low-affect geniality. Romain gives me a quick tour of the inventory, which sits in bulk quantities behind the bar in plastic food-prep containers.
The bottom shelf holds such products as White Russian, Cherry Bomb, Cheese, and White Choco, all strains of Cannabis indica, the shrublike, rapidly blooming upland subspecies that generally produces a stuporous body high that pairs nicely with a three-pound bag of Funyuns and a four-hour sofa fugue. On the next shelf, you've got Cannabis sativa, the willowy lowland variety whose longer flowering time and more refined psychotropic effects (a caffeinated mental high favored by aficionados) boost the sativa's price point by a euro or two.
The back bar's uppermost tier is reserved for de Dampkring's locally famous hash menu–fifteen varieties ranging from low-end Moroccan at 7.50 euros to top-grade Dutch Isolator hash at a breathtaking sixty euros per gram. The choicer selections of the weed menu hover between ten and thirteen euros (about $48 to $63 per eighth of an ounce), which is on a par with what you'd pay these days at an herbal-remedies pharmacy in L.A.
With an hour to go until the doors open at ten, Romain and I weigh the contents of each box after scanning its bar code into the shop's computer system to be sure supplies don't exceed a somewhat paltry 500 grams, the maximum weight a shop can legally have on hand. Los Angeles, rather more sanely, hasn't capped the inventory at medical-dope dispensaries. Holland's choice to restrict the weight merely imposes a hassle on the coffee shop, without affecting consumption in the least. On a busy day, the shop might sell 700 grams, so in order to keep the product stocked, runners must constantly shuttle in packages from the shop's safe houses, which warehouse inventories of many kilos and are therefore unambiguously illegal according to Dutch law. In another curious quirk of the gedoogbeleid code, while the runner's en route to the shop, he could be arrested for transporting controlled substances. But the instant he crosses the threshold, the shipment becomes salable merchandise.
At ten the doors swing open, admitting an inrush of après-breakfast clientele.
10:01. I transact my first "deal," with a young American tourist who, like most of my countrymen, is hysterically polite, murmuring a glossolalia of apologies for wanting to smell a few different strains (totally within the bounds of coffee-shop decorum) before settling on the Mango Haze. He whistles good-naturedly through the six minutes it takes me to weigh out a gram. At the coffee bar, he makes it halfway through a joint. Then he clutches his temples for fifteen minutes and lurches, walleyed and florid, for the door.
10:30. Middle-aged woman in a soigné leather jacket and cat's-eye librarian specs: "Ten grams of Hash Plant Haze, please." This is twice the legal limit, but even though she looks to me like she could be the file clerk down at the precinct house, Romain sells it to her anyway.
11:42. A lean, sour-looking gray-haired man asks for something in Dutch. "I'm sorry, I don't speak Dutch," I say.
"Ah, you can't speak Dutch," he says in snide and perfect English. "Get me someone who can."
1:37. A tribe of British louts come in. Their tall, whey-faced leader does the talking while his lieutenants cower behind him to see how it's done. "Do you sell weed?" he asks.
"Um, well, yes."
"No, man, I mean, do you sell sinsemilla, what the Jamaicans smoke?"
I explain (as I've only just learned) that sinsemilla simply means seedless buds from a female plant, which is all we sell.
"No, man," he says, exasperated. "What the Jamaicans smoke! They smoke weed, don't they? Ganja!" This mystifying exchange wears on until he at last buys a gram of Thai, which at 3.50 euros is the cheapest, shittiest thing on the menu–flat, brittle buds resembling nothing so much as dreadlocks snipped from a corpse.
By midafternoon, my hands are sufficiently caramelized with THC resin to merit ejection from a major league pitcher's mound. Rubbing my thumb against my forefingers rouses little rat turds of hashish. There's probably enough intoxicating filth that gnawing my fingertips would affect my mood, but I don't nibble them, taking seriously the house prohibition against dealers getting high on the job. Though other employees gripe about the policy, I hardly need a hit of anything. Simply working here makes me feel, in the worst possible way, as if I'm stoned to the limits of my capacity. The mere act of weighing the product, which must be done with ticklish exactitude, to the hundredth of a gram, while the customer rails at you–"Big buds! What's with all the shake? I'm not paying for that stem!"–is an occasion for nervousness and paranoia of the first order. A third or so of the customers buy hash, most of it cheap stuff, which is hard as a boot sole and requires a kitchen knife to apportion. If you don't nail a perfect gram on the first chop, you have to make the weight by laboriously shaving brown flour into the scale pan while the customer volubly wonders who let this fumbling idiot behind the bar. Compounding my professional stress is the computerized inventory system, which, as a prophylactic against embezzlement, is finely tuned to track near-atomic quantities of product that might go missing. (For example, the system builds in a standard deduction for the sticky crumbs of hash residue that cling to the edge of the kitchen knife.)
It's like working at a Starbucks where the customers are cranky zombies, where a latte costs fifty bucks, and where a stray speck of coffee grounds falling underfoot will probably mean an ass-chewing from your superintimidating manager.
By the time the shift's winding down at five, I'm so rattled that when a customer comes in and places an intricate order for five different products, I don't realize until he's out the door that I've given him twenty euros too much in change. Red-faced and mortified, I slip one of my own twenties into the till. I grab my coat and, at a speed walker's clip, set off to find a beer.
So wait a second. If the Christian Democratic Appeal promised its constituents to close all coffee shops, and if commercial-scale cultivation and distribution of cannabis remains a serious crime in the Netherlands, then why, you might rightly wonder, don't the police simply roust the runners, raid the safe houses, and pull the plug on the coffee shops?
Well, of course, there's the half-billion-dollar or so tax benefit Holland reaps each year from its 700 shops, and the reduced criminal-justice tab. (America's enforcement of its marijuana laws, FYI, costs our government about $13 billion annually, according to one estimate.) And there's also the fact that from a public-health standpoint, gedoogbeleid pretty much works. The ready availability of hash and weed has not transformed Holland into a nation of dope fiends or twice-baked couch potatoes. A 2005 study revealed that a little over 22 percent of Dutch citizens had at some point sampled cannabis. That same year, a U.S. study found that slightly more than 48 percent of Americans had smoked weed or hashish at least once in their lifetimes.
The tolerance policy sprang from the Opium Act of 1976, when Amsterdam and other cities were suffering gruesome epidemics of ****** addiction. Before 1976, the law made no distinction between cannabis and hard drugs, and the criminal networks that distributed them didn't either. It wasn't helping the nation's narcotics woes that a recreational hash smoker might have to patronize a dealer who could upsell him on a purchase of ****** or *******. So in the interest of severing the commercial relationship between cannabis and harder drugs, the state let the coffee shops abide. The act's logic, apparently, has panned out. The United Nations' 2009 World Drug Report places opiate and ******* use in the Netherlands well behind that of the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Denmark.
Yet these are irksome times for weed-industry professionals who have, comparatively, had it pretty easy up until now. They complain about the 2007 prohibition on selling alcohol at the beverage counter, about 2008's ban on the sale of psychedelic mushrooms (this after a reportedly tripping French tourist flung herself off a downtown building); they gripe with fear and passion about a proscription against hash bars within 250 meters of schools, and they bemoan the $13 million fine assessed an owner in south Holland for holding too much weight.
The backlash, some say, is the fault of the shortsighted hippie activists who, back in the late '60s and early '70s, won gedoogbeleid by crusading for their God-given right to get high. While this spared a lot of petty busts, it didn't redeem weed from its underworld associations, practically or philosophically. By keeping cultivation and distribution illegal, the Dutch system ensures a steady, lucrative, and tax-free income for people like the Albanian mobsters who, after crackdowns on local boutique growers, increasingly supply Amsterdam's market.
Conversely, America, via the sturdier Trojan horse of medical marijuana, looks poised to chart a wiser course, through policies that more closely resemble full legalization than "tolerance." While Dutch dollars still flow to Baltic thugs, states like Michigan license small-time growers to provide for certified "patients." American legalization would also almost certainly include FDA regulation and chemical analysis of the product for sale. Holland's prohibition against advertising cannabis also forbids coffee shops from posting a weed strain's chemical profile (i.e., the levels of painkilling chemicals versus those that fuck you up), useful information for both the medical patient and the tourist who wishes not to pass out on the bar.
By liberating cannabis from the symbolic company of ******, *******, and Ecstasy and grafting it to the sympathetic litany of "glaucoma, cancer, and AIDS," America's cannabis activists have, by all appearances, begun extending marijuana's roots into the culture to depths undreamed by the Dutch. At the start of 2010, Los Angeles alone had nearly as many dispensaries as Holland has shops, one of the reasons that Dutch weed professionals sound like Dust Bowl Okies when they talk about California and the other markets emerging in the United States.
"Lots of us are saying, 'Fuck it, I'll move to California and make millions. I'd go tomorrow if the, you know, whole American thing didn't make me so fucking paranoid," said one weed broker, citing, as examples of the American "thing," the resemblance between Obama's campaign posters and the iconography of North Korea's Kim Jong Il and how September 11 was an inside job.
Day two on the job, and I'm pleased to report a marked diminishment of the rookie-dope-barista jimjams. The tricky scales no longer terrify me, and I'm bird-dogging customers this morning with sprightly mercantile gusto.
A gram of the King Hassan (cheap Moroccan hash)? No sweat–.92 on the first chop. Not bad!
White Widow? Actually, we're out, but here, buddy, take a whiff of this White Russian. It's White Widow crossed with AK-47, as you probably know.
The Bio Highrise? "Bio" means it's grown in soil, not hydro. Pretty tasty indica. Very groovy body high. The Amnesia Haze? Oh yeah, that's, uh, very groovy, too. Two grams? Enjoy your smoke, guys.
11:20. I close the Amnesia Haze deal with a trio of American dudes who I can tell just arrived in Amsterdam, because they don't yet have the dark, butthole-ish look about the eyes that reefer tourists develop by their second day in town. They go to the coffee counter and roll a joint. I'm weighing out a gooey three-gram order of Indian Malana Cream hash when my co-worker, a friendly, thick-built guy named Felix, suddenly sprints from behind the bar. After two hits of the Amnesia Haze, one of the American youngsters is in the process of toppling, semiconscious, off his stool. Fainting customers are a familiar problem, and Felix moves with professional swiftness, managing to get his arms around the kid an instant before his skull smacks the floor. He comes to, his legs jerking with the spooky involuntariness of a lynched man's. As it turns out, they'd come straight off the red-eye from the States and hit de Dampkring on an empty stomach. The kid's pals take him to the hotel and put him to bed. In twenty minutes, they're back in the shop, enjoying themselves.
11:40. A Californian barnacle has attached himself to the bar. A dead ringer for John Denver, he's making it very tough to handle the pre-lunch rush because he keeps poring over the menu, going, "I really feel like smoking some hash, but then again, it's sort of like 'Why bother,' because the hash is so much better in California." At last he buys five prerolled spliffs ("I'd roll them myself," he informs me, "but I'm feeling a little lazy") and fucks off to the coffee counter, where I can hear him informing the Dutch girl behind the bar that Amsterdam is known as "the Magic City." But very shortly, he comes back to the dope counter, wanting to know if there's any Steely Dan on the house iTunes library: "As a self-appointed Steely Dan expert, I highly advise playing The Royal Scam as soon as possible." Felix, to my amazement, obliges the guy, who's then impossible to dislodge from our personal space because now he has also appointed himself our expert guide through the album's forty-minute saxophone purgatory, all the while telling me how "amazing" the women are in Amsterdam, by which he means the underpant ladies in the red-lit aquariums who tap sorrowfully on the glass when you pass by.
By midafternoon my sense of professional satisfaction at holding my own behind the bar deflates under the oppressive tedium of the work and the customer-relations grind. The trepidation with which the customers filled me at first has taken a turn toward mild contempt. Perhaps it's an innocuous side effect of the self-regarding involution of the stoned psyche, or perhaps it's that they're just too high to cope with human interaction, but after a few shifts, it becomes clear that in the eyes of most customers, the guys behind the bar do not really exist. They rarely look us in the eye and less often say "please" or "thank you." "Sometimes I'll try acting like a real asshole, just to see if they notice," says Felix. "But they don't even fucking see you, man. It's like you're not even there."
3:35. A crew of large black gentlemen come to the bar. They have the look of residents from the Bijlmer, a ghetto on the city's southeast side, whose population inspired de Dampkring's "no hats" policy and the prohibition against hip-hop in the iTunes library. Their style, however, is several orders of magnitude more baroque and fabulous than their American counterparts': an Ali Baba's cave worth of gold and diamonds studding their teeth and ears. Rococo braid jobs that less resemble cornrows than Louis XIV brocadework. They place an order. "I'm sorry, I don't speak Dutch."
"Three grams White Choco."
I fill it. "Dank u wel," I say. (Thank you very much, the only words I know in Dutch.)
This strikes these fellows as hilarious. "Ah, you do speak Dutch! Can you say, 'Sucky fucky'?"
"No, I'm afraid I can't."
Chortling, the crew departs. "Thank you, thank you!" the fellows call as they head for the door, reeling with mirth.
4:10. John Denver, sated after an afternoon of I'd-rather-not-know-what, comes back to reinstall himself at the bar. "How'd you get this job, anyway? You're a lucky man. I know people who'd pay a thousand dollars to pull one shift back there."
After a long, hard day of buying and selling marijuana, a salon of industry pros convenes at Harry Resin's apartment. When I've showered and scrubbed the tar off my hands, I make my way over.
Tonight's gathering includes Dampkring manager Jason den Enting; a substantial, loquacious woman called, appropriately, Verb; and also this guy Ron, whose last name I don't know and am not intended to know. Ron, who stands about six feet five and has the deep, slow voice associated with giantism, plays an undisclosed role in de Dampkring's management, though when people ask him what he does for a living, he sometimes says he is Paul Wilhelm's bodyguard, or more frequently he says, "I smoke marijuana."
I am not too comfortable around Ron, because the first time I met him, he told me this anecdote: "I don't like cops. I once went to jail for manslaughter of a policeman, and when I got out I was so pissed off, I did it again. I hit the cop with my fucking car. Prison was not so bad. They let me have a bird. One annoying thing is, there is a speaker which they use to wake you up, but you can make it quiet if you smear a handful of shit in the speaker, and then a guy has to come and get the shit out of all of the little holes in the speaker, which is really funny." (As it turns out, by "manslaughter" Ron only meant "assault," but still.)
When I walk in, Ron and Jason are sitting on the sofa, listening to Harry talk between puffs about how a few years back, he found God. He did it by harnessing his Kundalini power through Tantric sex and also by partaking of the eighteen breaths of power, which activated this three-dimensional purple energy field in the shape of a "star tetrahedron" around his body, at which point he literally flew out of his third eye in the lotus position and flew so high into the air that he was able to perceive what the mystic Drunvalo Melchizedek refers to as "the Christ Grid," which is this grid of energy around the planet, and suddenly he was literally in outer space, and he could see satellites and everything and the thirteen planets in alignment, and the shit was literally like 2001: A Space Odyssey.
And Jason goes, "Ah, shit, come on, man, stop it. Now you're going to start talking about how you were a Jew in Auschwitz in your past life."
"But I was, I was!" says Harry.
Which sends Verb into a long filibuster about her past lives, which include a soldier at the Battle of Appomattox, a medieval scribe, and a stone carver in the ancient city of Petra.
This talk doesn't jibe with Jason den Enting's Dutch rationality. "What I want to know," he says, "is how come nobody ever remembers the huge, yummy pile of shit you ate when you got reincarnated as a shit fly?"
So now Verb gets sort of pissed off and starts to yell at Jason a little bit: "Your problem is you're not using your corpus callosum to connect the left and right sides of your brain. If we took an electronic reading of your brain, we'd see that you're dealing only with logic."
This goes on for two hours or so, until finally Verb takes off, and Harry sees fit to break out this monster sack of extremely good Dutch Isolator, the kind of hash that costs you sixty euros per gram in the shop. Under a microscope, a THC crystal looks like the end of a car antenna: a stalk with a terminal ball. By passing the resin (in a suspension of chilled water) through successively smaller screens, Harry explains, the manufacturers of Isolator hash strain out just the balls, the purest part of the crystal. He tips a bit of brown powder onto a portable scale (to ensure that he doesn't share too much of the costly goods) and loads and lights a glass pipe. "Full melt!" he cries. "Full fuckin' dome!" (Translation: "You can tell this is great stuff because under the flame it doesn't char briquettishly but liquefies and balloons as only the best hash does!")
He passes the pipe to me, and against my better judgment I take a solid pull. The flavor is so purely chemical that it tastes less like an agricultural product than a hit off a Scotchgard can. To my surprise, my suddenly extremely stoned mind doesn't begin its habitual uncellaring of '45 Mouton Rothschild self-hatred and social anxiety. Nor do I experience the urge to flee all human company or sink into fearful silence. Instead, I feel clairvoyant, adrenalized, and full of bonhomie. I loiter on the sofa, chatting amiably and confidently, utterly untroubled that I can't recall a word I've said the instant after I utter it. It's a wonderfully liberating, energizing mind erasure. At last, on the cusp of middle age, I've discovered a strain of dope that I like very much, though it's probably a good thing that it sells at twice the price of gold.
"I hate the fucking night shift," says Romain. "Boring as hell." It's nine o'clock on a weeknight, and we don't get off until two. The place is close to empty, save two Chinese tourists at the bar. One of them is engaged in an effortful two-handed procedure that looks more like the administration of an Indian sunburn than the rolling of a jaybird. My heels are hot from idle hours on my feet. My legs seem to tremble with the pending eruption of varicose veins.
A customer: "Salad Bowl! One gram!" I fill it. He scowls.
"What's this? Give me Salad Sativa. This is shit!"
I rebag the order and very pointedly do not say, "Dank u wel."
A customer comes in: "Two euros King Hassan." Cutting so miserly a portion of such hard hash is like trying to subdivide a sugar cube. I spend a while whittling out the stingy little portion. He drops a fistful of one-cent coins onto the bar.
The next client places a complex order for eighty-five euros' worth of hash and weed. It takes ten minutes to fill. As an expression of gratitude, he tips me a fifty-cent piece, rapping it loudly on the bar as though to herald a remarkable event.
By nine thirty or so, I've shed all traces of rookie eager-beaverhood and completed the transformation to disgruntled crank. My chief complaint about the job right now is that it offers no opportunities to covertly cheat or screw over my uncivil clientele. With the scales in plain view and the product bagged in clear plastic, you can't short a churlish customer or stick him with stems and shake. We're denied even the vengeful prerogatives of McDonald's line cooks, who are at least empowered to lace your Big Mac with spittle or pubic hair.
"Whaddya want?" I snap at the next customer, a beleaguered-looking woman in her early sixties.
"I like a gram of something relaxing," she says with an Eastern European accent. Wearily, bitchily, I recommend the Cherry Bomb. "Okay, but is very expensive for me. I spend all day cleaning houses. My hands hurt, you know. I need it for my arthritis."
I feel like a petulant jerk for being curt with her, and as I hand her six euros' worth of vegetables, I'm struck by the ludicrousness of laws that would try to keep a nugget of innocuous plant materials out of an arthritic housekeeper's hands. Or, for that matter, anyone's. It comes as a sort of reverse revelation that the most troubling thing about the job of a professional dope dealer is how closely it resembles every other shitty service-sector job that millions of people spend their days doing and hating. In the past week, I've witnessed no fights, seen no weapons flashed, no examples of hopeless marijuana addiction, nothing more upsetting than some forced exposure to Steely Dan and a college kid who slipped off his stool to be caught in the arms of a friendly professional. Any bartender in America probably deals with more trying situations in thirty minutes than I've confronted in almost forty hours behind the hash counter. To the American reactionaries still frantically piling policy sandbags against the fissured dike of American cannabis laws, I would like to say this: I have now lived a week in our future world of (approximately) legalized dope, and it is every bit as perilous as the world of legalized pencils.
Nevertheless, this reflection doesn't do a whole lot to buoy my mood. By eleven I'm sulking flagrantly enough that a customer takes note.
"Is something wrong?"
"No. Can I help you?"
"Ah, you are American," he says. "You have a very sad story. You come here. You get stuck, and now you are selling drugs."
I tell him no, in fact, I'm heading home tomorrow.
"Oh, good," he says with a smile. "For a visitor, there are two very happy days in Amsterdam–the day you get here and the day you leave."
NewsHawk: Ganjarden: 420 MAGAZINE
Source: GQ
Author: Wells Tower
Contact: GQ
Copyright: 2010 GQ
Website: My Kushy New Job
The seminar is taking place on the second floor of the Dampkring's forward-looking modern branch, whose decor tends toward diamond plate and brushed steel, in deliberate disdain, the owner tells me, for the hippy-shit aesthetics, smoke-browned Hendrix posters, and Jamaican tricolor of the last-gen Amsterdam dope joint. Despite the ineradicable skunk's-tail perfume leaching from the Sheetrock, the shop this morning is a pretty faithful imitation of a high school classroom–from the distracted bespectacled lecturer (a representative from a nonprofit drug-counseling agency) futzing with the overhead projector to the two icily pretty cheerleader types giggling in malicious-sounding Dutch while stocking their desktops with schoolgirl tackle (moisturizer, makeup, chocolates, tissue packets) to the rearmost dunce row, where I've been quarantined with my translator, who told me to call him Harry Resin. A merry Canadian in his midthirties who has lived in Amsterdam for the past decade or so, Harry was drafted into translation detail by Dampkring management and is not delighted about it. "I haven't been up this early in years," he says.
Harry, who formerly ran a seed business and now spends his days as a cannabis-policy gadfly, is also unhappy because we're forbidden to get high during class. On a typical day, Harry likes to spark a joint the size of a cornucopia shortly after getting out of bed and to spark another one every fifteen minutes or so until it's time to go to sleep at night. By his own account, Harry smokes ten to fourteen ounces per month (in the neighborhood of $5,000 worth if he were paying retail, which he does not). So, thwarted for the next few hours, Harry impatiently rolls one hefty spliff of G13-Amnesia Haze after another, lining them up on his desk in anticipation of the noontime lunch break.
Our instructor opens the session with the gentle question "How does it feel to work in a coffee shop?" Contrary to my conception of Holland as a freethinking sort of nation where it's no more fraught to suck a public bongload than an after-dinner mint, a number of people confess feeling a sense of vague disgrace at working in the industry.
"I guess I'm sort of a source of shame for my family," says one dealer (as the hash-bar staffers are known).
"I don't tell people," says a cheerleader. "I just say I work in hospitality."
"I say the same thing," offers Dampkring owner Paul Wilhelm, whose unflagging smirk and mirthfully squinted eyes give him the look of a man trapped in a mild and hilarious g-force machine. "It used to be cannabis was nothing; it was spinach. These days, if you say you own a coffee shop, people think you're a criminal."
Despite the smoggy lamentations of American stoners–"Man, why can't we just be cool about weed like the Dutch?"–Dutch industry pros increasingly despair of Holland's cannabis status quo and look with envy at the situation in the United States. With pot decriminalized in thirteen states and medical marijuana metastasizing onto ballot measures nationwide, America's cannabis policy is reaching a tipping point. Weed advocates on both sides of the Atlantic are hoping we'll craft something smarter and more durable than the jerry-rigged system reigning in Holland. While part of my reason for coming to Amsterdam was to get a glimpse of what may become America's newest retail sector, after a conversation or two with people here, Holland looks less like a blueprint for America's pending cannabis legislation and more a cautionary exhibit of mistakes we shouldn't make.
Marijuana and establishments that sell it remain illegal in Holland, but the industry operates more or less in plain sight through a statutory gray area known as gedoogbeleid, roughly "tolerance." The tolerance policy protects smokers possessing five grams or less but cuts local government plenty of prosecutorial slack to harry shop owners at the first shift of Holland's culture wars. The national statutes are sufficiently loose and leaky that almost forty years after the first coffee shop opened its doors, the center-right Christian Democratic Appeal–until recently Holland's ruling party–has pledged to shutter every hash bar on Dutch soil. And while coffee shops operate at the pleasure of city government, not national parties like the CDA, Holland's dope outlets have undergone a substantial die-off of late. In 1997, at least 1,019 coffee shops were doing business in the Netherlands. But after a quiet epidemic of denied shop-license renewals and selective enforcement of gedoogbeleid's caprices, today's number is closer to 700. Rotterdam alone closed a third of its shops in 2008. These are anxious times in the dope trade, which is why, through voluntary measures like today's clinic, shop owners are doing all they can to stay on the good side of the law.
So here in the dunce row, determined to be the most upstanding dope dealer I can possibly be, I'm jotting notes at a stenographic rate. The lecturer is just now getting into the most crucial leg of his spiel, the five unbending commandments of pot commerce: Coffee shops are forbidden to advertise, to sell to persons under 18, to cause a public nuisance, to sell hard drugs, or to maintain an inventory of more than 500 grams (about 17.6 ounces). Breaking any of these could result in fines, closure, or a prison term.
But as he starts detailing in Dutch some of the subtler particulars of the law, it suddenly becomes very tough to follow the lecture, because one of the cheerleaders in the next row has turned in her seat to call my translator's attention to something important: In the second-story window across the street, we can plainly see a large television screening video footage of someone's bottom getting quite seriously poked by a vast empurpled dong. Scholarship titters to a halt in our part of the room. And now, Jason den Enting, Dampkring's fearsome manager, comes over to see what the problem is, and Harry Resin giggles and gestures helplessly at the window. "It's really distracting," he pleads.
Jason, a tall, gruff man whose shaved pate and brusque manner lend him the air of a scarcely rehabilitated skinhead, scowls at the vista for a moment. "Anal!" he barks, affronted. But shortly, a heavyset woman with a badass matronly look enters the apartment across the street. The television hurriedly goes dark, and study recommences.
Midafternoon, training day concludes with a role-play customer-service practicum in which we're to pair up and rehearse the proper etiquette for ejecting minors from the shop. To my great chagrin, Jason den Enting, wary perhaps that my ineptitude behind the bar might provoke a visit from the vice squad, selects me as his partner.
"Okay," he says, "I'm a 15-year-old girl getting high on your shift. Kick me out."
"Um, hi," I say, my fingers tented tremblingly at my chest. "Can I see some ID, ma'am?"
Jason duly refuses. I repeat the petition. He waves me off, at which point I say in a shrill, Nellie voice, "Well, fine, then I guess I'll just have to call the police!"
Jason bursts into scornful laughter, pointing out that, given municipal contempt for coffee shops, I'd have about as much luck summoning the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders as the Amsterdam P.D. We do a few disastrous retakes, in which I'm again somehow unable to refrain from hysterical threats to call the law. Finally, Jason gives up, shaking his head in weary resignation, but nevertheless lets me receive a diploma certifying my status as a credentialed dope peddler.
"I would kill to have your job" is a sentiment I'll hear from tourists by the dozen during my week behind the Dampkring bar, though in fact I anticipate the exercise with cold anxiety. Part of the job, I've already been told, will involve smoking weed in quantity, and marijuana and I do not make a happy team. "Paranoia" doesn't adequately get at what I suffer while I'm high. It's more like Ebola of the superego, a self-loathing catatonia of uncertainty and dread. When I'm stoned, Homo sapiens and its customs become terrifying and obscure. Shortly after the first good toke, I can almost hear a delicate shardwork of baffling human etiquette crystallizing in the air around me, making it impossible to so much as reach for a Cheeto without causing an apocalypse.
That said, I managed to sustain a fairly heavy habit during junior high school in North Carolina, mostly to spook my folks. But that was back in the mid-'80s, when all we could get our hands on was seed-studded ditch weed you could smoke by the bale and still not be sure whether you were actually stoned or if you'd just stood up too quick. At college in Connecticut, I had my first woeful exposure to connoisseur-grade ganja, hydroponic sinsemilla a friend brought up from Miami. I knew I was high when I smoked that stuff, because suddenly the Pearl Jam CD somebody had put on would seem not just derivative and mediocre but proof that we were stupid, mediocre people for listening to it. Then I'd leap to the revelation that I hated my friends and that they hated me, at which point I would usually projectile-vomit into the wastebasket while one of my hateful pals held back the tresses of my Eddie Vedder hairdo. The barfing response happened reliably enough that for the decade after college, I stopped smoking pot altogether. Every now and again I give it another shot, taking homeopathic doses late at night in the solitude of my own home. But in the morning, I'll find unpleasant notes ("400 crunches now, you pudgy fuck!") taped to the mirror where I spent an hour the previous evening appalling myself with the sight of my nude body. Generally I leave the stuff alone.
That's all to say that when Jason den *Enting hands me an assortment of six or seven strains as "homework" for my first day on the job, it's not an assignment I greet with unalloyed relish. But being a responsible journalist, I take the garden basket to a dozy-looking coffee shop with the intention of jotting taster's notes to relay to my customers. At 36, I'm still incapable of rolling a joint and too self-conscious to ask to borrow the house bong. So what I do is roll a few frail taco-like objects, set them messily afire, and hoover after the smoke with grasping lips.
When Jason asks me before my first shift, "So, you did your homework? You know your way around the menu?" I say, "Oh, sure." But what really happened during my tasting session was that I got very worried that someone in the coffee shop might try to talk to me, so I sprinted back to my hotel and stood in front of the elevator for thirty terrified seconds, praying that I wouldn't have to cope with the desk clerk bidding me good evening. At last I made it to the third floor and was so relieved to reach the sanctuary of my room that I spent twenty minutes moonwalking the carpet and singing Andy Gibb's "I Just Want to Be Your Everything" before collapsing on the bed, where I lay awake until dawn, quaking with the conviction that every decision I've made since birth has been corrupt, selfish, and wrong.
At quarter of nine on a Wednesday morning, I report for my first shift. I'll be working at de Dampkring on the Handboogstraat, a cheery alley just off the Damstraat, a heavily touristed promenade connecting the Flower Market to Dam Square. The Handboogstraat shop, a cozy enclave that can comfortably seat thirty or so, is a study in Art Nouveau psychedelia. Lava-lamp swirls predominate. The coffee bar is nearly overwhelmed by a biomorphic plaster mass aglow with party bulbs. The shop is pleasant and trippy in a somehow classic fashion. It's like being inside the lovely bowels of Toulouse-Lautrec.
The hash (or "stuff") bar lies at the room's rear, past the beverage counter. Today I'll be manning the bar with Romain, a young blond fellow with vaguely Asiatic eyes who emanates Holland's national mien of low-affect geniality. Romain gives me a quick tour of the inventory, which sits in bulk quantities behind the bar in plastic food-prep containers.
The bottom shelf holds such products as White Russian, Cherry Bomb, Cheese, and White Choco, all strains of Cannabis indica, the shrublike, rapidly blooming upland subspecies that generally produces a stuporous body high that pairs nicely with a three-pound bag of Funyuns and a four-hour sofa fugue. On the next shelf, you've got Cannabis sativa, the willowy lowland variety whose longer flowering time and more refined psychotropic effects (a caffeinated mental high favored by aficionados) boost the sativa's price point by a euro or two.
The back bar's uppermost tier is reserved for de Dampkring's locally famous hash menu–fifteen varieties ranging from low-end Moroccan at 7.50 euros to top-grade Dutch Isolator hash at a breathtaking sixty euros per gram. The choicer selections of the weed menu hover between ten and thirteen euros (about $48 to $63 per eighth of an ounce), which is on a par with what you'd pay these days at an herbal-remedies pharmacy in L.A.
With an hour to go until the doors open at ten, Romain and I weigh the contents of each box after scanning its bar code into the shop's computer system to be sure supplies don't exceed a somewhat paltry 500 grams, the maximum weight a shop can legally have on hand. Los Angeles, rather more sanely, hasn't capped the inventory at medical-dope dispensaries. Holland's choice to restrict the weight merely imposes a hassle on the coffee shop, without affecting consumption in the least. On a busy day, the shop might sell 700 grams, so in order to keep the product stocked, runners must constantly shuttle in packages from the shop's safe houses, which warehouse inventories of many kilos and are therefore unambiguously illegal according to Dutch law. In another curious quirk of the gedoogbeleid code, while the runner's en route to the shop, he could be arrested for transporting controlled substances. But the instant he crosses the threshold, the shipment becomes salable merchandise.
At ten the doors swing open, admitting an inrush of après-breakfast clientele.
10:01. I transact my first "deal," with a young American tourist who, like most of my countrymen, is hysterically polite, murmuring a glossolalia of apologies for wanting to smell a few different strains (totally within the bounds of coffee-shop decorum) before settling on the Mango Haze. He whistles good-naturedly through the six minutes it takes me to weigh out a gram. At the coffee bar, he makes it halfway through a joint. Then he clutches his temples for fifteen minutes and lurches, walleyed and florid, for the door.
10:30. Middle-aged woman in a soigné leather jacket and cat's-eye librarian specs: "Ten grams of Hash Plant Haze, please." This is twice the legal limit, but even though she looks to me like she could be the file clerk down at the precinct house, Romain sells it to her anyway.
11:42. A lean, sour-looking gray-haired man asks for something in Dutch. "I'm sorry, I don't speak Dutch," I say.
"Ah, you can't speak Dutch," he says in snide and perfect English. "Get me someone who can."
1:37. A tribe of British louts come in. Their tall, whey-faced leader does the talking while his lieutenants cower behind him to see how it's done. "Do you sell weed?" he asks.
"Um, well, yes."
"No, man, I mean, do you sell sinsemilla, what the Jamaicans smoke?"
I explain (as I've only just learned) that sinsemilla simply means seedless buds from a female plant, which is all we sell.
"No, man," he says, exasperated. "What the Jamaicans smoke! They smoke weed, don't they? Ganja!" This mystifying exchange wears on until he at last buys a gram of Thai, which at 3.50 euros is the cheapest, shittiest thing on the menu–flat, brittle buds resembling nothing so much as dreadlocks snipped from a corpse.
By midafternoon, my hands are sufficiently caramelized with THC resin to merit ejection from a major league pitcher's mound. Rubbing my thumb against my forefingers rouses little rat turds of hashish. There's probably enough intoxicating filth that gnawing my fingertips would affect my mood, but I don't nibble them, taking seriously the house prohibition against dealers getting high on the job. Though other employees gripe about the policy, I hardly need a hit of anything. Simply working here makes me feel, in the worst possible way, as if I'm stoned to the limits of my capacity. The mere act of weighing the product, which must be done with ticklish exactitude, to the hundredth of a gram, while the customer rails at you–"Big buds! What's with all the shake? I'm not paying for that stem!"–is an occasion for nervousness and paranoia of the first order. A third or so of the customers buy hash, most of it cheap stuff, which is hard as a boot sole and requires a kitchen knife to apportion. If you don't nail a perfect gram on the first chop, you have to make the weight by laboriously shaving brown flour into the scale pan while the customer volubly wonders who let this fumbling idiot behind the bar. Compounding my professional stress is the computerized inventory system, which, as a prophylactic against embezzlement, is finely tuned to track near-atomic quantities of product that might go missing. (For example, the system builds in a standard deduction for the sticky crumbs of hash residue that cling to the edge of the kitchen knife.)
It's like working at a Starbucks where the customers are cranky zombies, where a latte costs fifty bucks, and where a stray speck of coffee grounds falling underfoot will probably mean an ass-chewing from your superintimidating manager.
By the time the shift's winding down at five, I'm so rattled that when a customer comes in and places an intricate order for five different products, I don't realize until he's out the door that I've given him twenty euros too much in change. Red-faced and mortified, I slip one of my own twenties into the till. I grab my coat and, at a speed walker's clip, set off to find a beer.
So wait a second. If the Christian Democratic Appeal promised its constituents to close all coffee shops, and if commercial-scale cultivation and distribution of cannabis remains a serious crime in the Netherlands, then why, you might rightly wonder, don't the police simply roust the runners, raid the safe houses, and pull the plug on the coffee shops?
Well, of course, there's the half-billion-dollar or so tax benefit Holland reaps each year from its 700 shops, and the reduced criminal-justice tab. (America's enforcement of its marijuana laws, FYI, costs our government about $13 billion annually, according to one estimate.) And there's also the fact that from a public-health standpoint, gedoogbeleid pretty much works. The ready availability of hash and weed has not transformed Holland into a nation of dope fiends or twice-baked couch potatoes. A 2005 study revealed that a little over 22 percent of Dutch citizens had at some point sampled cannabis. That same year, a U.S. study found that slightly more than 48 percent of Americans had smoked weed or hashish at least once in their lifetimes.
The tolerance policy sprang from the Opium Act of 1976, when Amsterdam and other cities were suffering gruesome epidemics of ****** addiction. Before 1976, the law made no distinction between cannabis and hard drugs, and the criminal networks that distributed them didn't either. It wasn't helping the nation's narcotics woes that a recreational hash smoker might have to patronize a dealer who could upsell him on a purchase of ****** or *******. So in the interest of severing the commercial relationship between cannabis and harder drugs, the state let the coffee shops abide. The act's logic, apparently, has panned out. The United Nations' 2009 World Drug Report places opiate and ******* use in the Netherlands well behind that of the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Denmark.
Yet these are irksome times for weed-industry professionals who have, comparatively, had it pretty easy up until now. They complain about the 2007 prohibition on selling alcohol at the beverage counter, about 2008's ban on the sale of psychedelic mushrooms (this after a reportedly tripping French tourist flung herself off a downtown building); they gripe with fear and passion about a proscription against hash bars within 250 meters of schools, and they bemoan the $13 million fine assessed an owner in south Holland for holding too much weight.
The backlash, some say, is the fault of the shortsighted hippie activists who, back in the late '60s and early '70s, won gedoogbeleid by crusading for their God-given right to get high. While this spared a lot of petty busts, it didn't redeem weed from its underworld associations, practically or philosophically. By keeping cultivation and distribution illegal, the Dutch system ensures a steady, lucrative, and tax-free income for people like the Albanian mobsters who, after crackdowns on local boutique growers, increasingly supply Amsterdam's market.
Conversely, America, via the sturdier Trojan horse of medical marijuana, looks poised to chart a wiser course, through policies that more closely resemble full legalization than "tolerance." While Dutch dollars still flow to Baltic thugs, states like Michigan license small-time growers to provide for certified "patients." American legalization would also almost certainly include FDA regulation and chemical analysis of the product for sale. Holland's prohibition against advertising cannabis also forbids coffee shops from posting a weed strain's chemical profile (i.e., the levels of painkilling chemicals versus those that fuck you up), useful information for both the medical patient and the tourist who wishes not to pass out on the bar.
By liberating cannabis from the symbolic company of ******, *******, and Ecstasy and grafting it to the sympathetic litany of "glaucoma, cancer, and AIDS," America's cannabis activists have, by all appearances, begun extending marijuana's roots into the culture to depths undreamed by the Dutch. At the start of 2010, Los Angeles alone had nearly as many dispensaries as Holland has shops, one of the reasons that Dutch weed professionals sound like Dust Bowl Okies when they talk about California and the other markets emerging in the United States.
"Lots of us are saying, 'Fuck it, I'll move to California and make millions. I'd go tomorrow if the, you know, whole American thing didn't make me so fucking paranoid," said one weed broker, citing, as examples of the American "thing," the resemblance between Obama's campaign posters and the iconography of North Korea's Kim Jong Il and how September 11 was an inside job.
Day two on the job, and I'm pleased to report a marked diminishment of the rookie-dope-barista jimjams. The tricky scales no longer terrify me, and I'm bird-dogging customers this morning with sprightly mercantile gusto.
A gram of the King Hassan (cheap Moroccan hash)? No sweat–.92 on the first chop. Not bad!
White Widow? Actually, we're out, but here, buddy, take a whiff of this White Russian. It's White Widow crossed with AK-47, as you probably know.
The Bio Highrise? "Bio" means it's grown in soil, not hydro. Pretty tasty indica. Very groovy body high. The Amnesia Haze? Oh yeah, that's, uh, very groovy, too. Two grams? Enjoy your smoke, guys.
11:20. I close the Amnesia Haze deal with a trio of American dudes who I can tell just arrived in Amsterdam, because they don't yet have the dark, butthole-ish look about the eyes that reefer tourists develop by their second day in town. They go to the coffee counter and roll a joint. I'm weighing out a gooey three-gram order of Indian Malana Cream hash when my co-worker, a friendly, thick-built guy named Felix, suddenly sprints from behind the bar. After two hits of the Amnesia Haze, one of the American youngsters is in the process of toppling, semiconscious, off his stool. Fainting customers are a familiar problem, and Felix moves with professional swiftness, managing to get his arms around the kid an instant before his skull smacks the floor. He comes to, his legs jerking with the spooky involuntariness of a lynched man's. As it turns out, they'd come straight off the red-eye from the States and hit de Dampkring on an empty stomach. The kid's pals take him to the hotel and put him to bed. In twenty minutes, they're back in the shop, enjoying themselves.
11:40. A Californian barnacle has attached himself to the bar. A dead ringer for John Denver, he's making it very tough to handle the pre-lunch rush because he keeps poring over the menu, going, "I really feel like smoking some hash, but then again, it's sort of like 'Why bother,' because the hash is so much better in California." At last he buys five prerolled spliffs ("I'd roll them myself," he informs me, "but I'm feeling a little lazy") and fucks off to the coffee counter, where I can hear him informing the Dutch girl behind the bar that Amsterdam is known as "the Magic City." But very shortly, he comes back to the dope counter, wanting to know if there's any Steely Dan on the house iTunes library: "As a self-appointed Steely Dan expert, I highly advise playing The Royal Scam as soon as possible." Felix, to my amazement, obliges the guy, who's then impossible to dislodge from our personal space because now he has also appointed himself our expert guide through the album's forty-minute saxophone purgatory, all the while telling me how "amazing" the women are in Amsterdam, by which he means the underpant ladies in the red-lit aquariums who tap sorrowfully on the glass when you pass by.
By midafternoon my sense of professional satisfaction at holding my own behind the bar deflates under the oppressive tedium of the work and the customer-relations grind. The trepidation with which the customers filled me at first has taken a turn toward mild contempt. Perhaps it's an innocuous side effect of the self-regarding involution of the stoned psyche, or perhaps it's that they're just too high to cope with human interaction, but after a few shifts, it becomes clear that in the eyes of most customers, the guys behind the bar do not really exist. They rarely look us in the eye and less often say "please" or "thank you." "Sometimes I'll try acting like a real asshole, just to see if they notice," says Felix. "But they don't even fucking see you, man. It's like you're not even there."
3:35. A crew of large black gentlemen come to the bar. They have the look of residents from the Bijlmer, a ghetto on the city's southeast side, whose population inspired de Dampkring's "no hats" policy and the prohibition against hip-hop in the iTunes library. Their style, however, is several orders of magnitude more baroque and fabulous than their American counterparts': an Ali Baba's cave worth of gold and diamonds studding their teeth and ears. Rococo braid jobs that less resemble cornrows than Louis XIV brocadework. They place an order. "I'm sorry, I don't speak Dutch."
"Three grams White Choco."
I fill it. "Dank u wel," I say. (Thank you very much, the only words I know in Dutch.)
This strikes these fellows as hilarious. "Ah, you do speak Dutch! Can you say, 'Sucky fucky'?"
"No, I'm afraid I can't."
Chortling, the crew departs. "Thank you, thank you!" the fellows call as they head for the door, reeling with mirth.
4:10. John Denver, sated after an afternoon of I'd-rather-not-know-what, comes back to reinstall himself at the bar. "How'd you get this job, anyway? You're a lucky man. I know people who'd pay a thousand dollars to pull one shift back there."
After a long, hard day of buying and selling marijuana, a salon of industry pros convenes at Harry Resin's apartment. When I've showered and scrubbed the tar off my hands, I make my way over.
Tonight's gathering includes Dampkring manager Jason den Enting; a substantial, loquacious woman called, appropriately, Verb; and also this guy Ron, whose last name I don't know and am not intended to know. Ron, who stands about six feet five and has the deep, slow voice associated with giantism, plays an undisclosed role in de Dampkring's management, though when people ask him what he does for a living, he sometimes says he is Paul Wilhelm's bodyguard, or more frequently he says, "I smoke marijuana."
I am not too comfortable around Ron, because the first time I met him, he told me this anecdote: "I don't like cops. I once went to jail for manslaughter of a policeman, and when I got out I was so pissed off, I did it again. I hit the cop with my fucking car. Prison was not so bad. They let me have a bird. One annoying thing is, there is a speaker which they use to wake you up, but you can make it quiet if you smear a handful of shit in the speaker, and then a guy has to come and get the shit out of all of the little holes in the speaker, which is really funny." (As it turns out, by "manslaughter" Ron only meant "assault," but still.)
When I walk in, Ron and Jason are sitting on the sofa, listening to Harry talk between puffs about how a few years back, he found God. He did it by harnessing his Kundalini power through Tantric sex and also by partaking of the eighteen breaths of power, which activated this three-dimensional purple energy field in the shape of a "star tetrahedron" around his body, at which point he literally flew out of his third eye in the lotus position and flew so high into the air that he was able to perceive what the mystic Drunvalo Melchizedek refers to as "the Christ Grid," which is this grid of energy around the planet, and suddenly he was literally in outer space, and he could see satellites and everything and the thirteen planets in alignment, and the shit was literally like 2001: A Space Odyssey.
And Jason goes, "Ah, shit, come on, man, stop it. Now you're going to start talking about how you were a Jew in Auschwitz in your past life."
"But I was, I was!" says Harry.
Which sends Verb into a long filibuster about her past lives, which include a soldier at the Battle of Appomattox, a medieval scribe, and a stone carver in the ancient city of Petra.
This talk doesn't jibe with Jason den Enting's Dutch rationality. "What I want to know," he says, "is how come nobody ever remembers the huge, yummy pile of shit you ate when you got reincarnated as a shit fly?"
So now Verb gets sort of pissed off and starts to yell at Jason a little bit: "Your problem is you're not using your corpus callosum to connect the left and right sides of your brain. If we took an electronic reading of your brain, we'd see that you're dealing only with logic."
This goes on for two hours or so, until finally Verb takes off, and Harry sees fit to break out this monster sack of extremely good Dutch Isolator, the kind of hash that costs you sixty euros per gram in the shop. Under a microscope, a THC crystal looks like the end of a car antenna: a stalk with a terminal ball. By passing the resin (in a suspension of chilled water) through successively smaller screens, Harry explains, the manufacturers of Isolator hash strain out just the balls, the purest part of the crystal. He tips a bit of brown powder onto a portable scale (to ensure that he doesn't share too much of the costly goods) and loads and lights a glass pipe. "Full melt!" he cries. "Full fuckin' dome!" (Translation: "You can tell this is great stuff because under the flame it doesn't char briquettishly but liquefies and balloons as only the best hash does!")
He passes the pipe to me, and against my better judgment I take a solid pull. The flavor is so purely chemical that it tastes less like an agricultural product than a hit off a Scotchgard can. To my surprise, my suddenly extremely stoned mind doesn't begin its habitual uncellaring of '45 Mouton Rothschild self-hatred and social anxiety. Nor do I experience the urge to flee all human company or sink into fearful silence. Instead, I feel clairvoyant, adrenalized, and full of bonhomie. I loiter on the sofa, chatting amiably and confidently, utterly untroubled that I can't recall a word I've said the instant after I utter it. It's a wonderfully liberating, energizing mind erasure. At last, on the cusp of middle age, I've discovered a strain of dope that I like very much, though it's probably a good thing that it sells at twice the price of gold.
"I hate the fucking night shift," says Romain. "Boring as hell." It's nine o'clock on a weeknight, and we don't get off until two. The place is close to empty, save two Chinese tourists at the bar. One of them is engaged in an effortful two-handed procedure that looks more like the administration of an Indian sunburn than the rolling of a jaybird. My heels are hot from idle hours on my feet. My legs seem to tremble with the pending eruption of varicose veins.
A customer: "Salad Bowl! One gram!" I fill it. He scowls.
"What's this? Give me Salad Sativa. This is shit!"
I rebag the order and very pointedly do not say, "Dank u wel."
A customer comes in: "Two euros King Hassan." Cutting so miserly a portion of such hard hash is like trying to subdivide a sugar cube. I spend a while whittling out the stingy little portion. He drops a fistful of one-cent coins onto the bar.
The next client places a complex order for eighty-five euros' worth of hash and weed. It takes ten minutes to fill. As an expression of gratitude, he tips me a fifty-cent piece, rapping it loudly on the bar as though to herald a remarkable event.
By nine thirty or so, I've shed all traces of rookie eager-beaverhood and completed the transformation to disgruntled crank. My chief complaint about the job right now is that it offers no opportunities to covertly cheat or screw over my uncivil clientele. With the scales in plain view and the product bagged in clear plastic, you can't short a churlish customer or stick him with stems and shake. We're denied even the vengeful prerogatives of McDonald's line cooks, who are at least empowered to lace your Big Mac with spittle or pubic hair.
"Whaddya want?" I snap at the next customer, a beleaguered-looking woman in her early sixties.
"I like a gram of something relaxing," she says with an Eastern European accent. Wearily, bitchily, I recommend the Cherry Bomb. "Okay, but is very expensive for me. I spend all day cleaning houses. My hands hurt, you know. I need it for my arthritis."
I feel like a petulant jerk for being curt with her, and as I hand her six euros' worth of vegetables, I'm struck by the ludicrousness of laws that would try to keep a nugget of innocuous plant materials out of an arthritic housekeeper's hands. Or, for that matter, anyone's. It comes as a sort of reverse revelation that the most troubling thing about the job of a professional dope dealer is how closely it resembles every other shitty service-sector job that millions of people spend their days doing and hating. In the past week, I've witnessed no fights, seen no weapons flashed, no examples of hopeless marijuana addiction, nothing more upsetting than some forced exposure to Steely Dan and a college kid who slipped off his stool to be caught in the arms of a friendly professional. Any bartender in America probably deals with more trying situations in thirty minutes than I've confronted in almost forty hours behind the hash counter. To the American reactionaries still frantically piling policy sandbags against the fissured dike of American cannabis laws, I would like to say this: I have now lived a week in our future world of (approximately) legalized dope, and it is every bit as perilous as the world of legalized pencils.
Nevertheless, this reflection doesn't do a whole lot to buoy my mood. By eleven I'm sulking flagrantly enough that a customer takes note.
"Is something wrong?"
"No. Can I help you?"
"Ah, you are American," he says. "You have a very sad story. You come here. You get stuck, and now you are selling drugs."
I tell him no, in fact, I'm heading home tomorrow.
"Oh, good," he says with a smile. "For a visitor, there are two very happy days in Amsterdam–the day you get here and the day you leave."
NewsHawk: Ganjarden: 420 MAGAZINE
Source: GQ
Author: Wells Tower
Contact: GQ
Copyright: 2010 GQ
Website: My Kushy New Job
