Pubdate: Tue, 24 Jan 2006
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2006 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Jeffrey Fleishman, Times Staff Writer
Cited: European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction 
http://www.emcdda.eu.int/
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?420 (Cannabis - Popular)

A CZECH TOKE ON FREEDOM

After Communism's Fall, the Scent of Marijuana Became a Symbol Of 
Liberation. It's Now So Mainstream, It's Raising New Concerns.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic -- The man with the dancing eyebrows and the 
blurry tattoo stands in the chilled night and opens the barred gate 
to his apartment. A dog sleeps on the bed; a snapping turtle floats 
inside a glass coffee table. A fan hums and a hot light glows in the 
bathroom, where 11 marijuana plants ripple like a tiny field against 
the porcelain. Sit, says J.X. Dolezal, a kind of Czech version of the 
late Hunter S. Thompson who has written the books "How to Take Drugs" 
and "Stoned County." He opens a box. There's a sprinkle across paper, 
a nimble roll of the fingers, a lick, a match strike, a curl of smoke 
- -- and a smile.

"Do you mind?" says Dolezal, his face slightly obscured as he 
exhales. "Excuse me if I don't offer you any. This marijuana's often 
too strong for my visitors. I had to resuscitate one guy for almost 
an hour once. You know, a higher percentage of people here grow their 
own marijuana than probably anywhere. It's typically Czech: a 
do-it-yourself nation."

The Czechs do like their weed. A 2005 report by the European 
Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction found that 22% of 
Czechs between 16 and 34 had smoked marijuana at least once during 
the previous year, the highest percentage in the European Union. The 
nation's cannabis culture is imbued with the whimsical ethos of the 
hippie movement: guys growing dope in fields, on balconies and in 
bathrooms, and sharing with friends.

"I've never paid for pot and I never would," said Filip Hubacek, a 
university student majoring in social sciences. "I don't mind paying 
for my gym, but not for my pot."

Selling or offering marijuana is illegal here, but the law is 
permeable, containing a passage that could have been lifted from a 
novel by Franz Kafka, the Prague-born chronicler of the absurd. It's 
OK to possess "no amount larger than a small amount," according to 
the statute. The metric rationalizations and extrapolations around 
such an ambiguous definition are debated with gleeful fervor amid 
smoke wisps in clubs and in apartments like Dolezal's.

"We have to be concerned with the use of marijuana," said Viktor 
Mravcik, director of a national agency that studies drug use and 
addiction. "It's becoming a political problem. It's not something we 
are proud of. One of our targets is to stop [the use of] marijuana 
and Ecstasy in the young population."

Marijuana and other drugs weren't widespread during the Cold War, at 
least not openly. The communist government considered marijuana an 
"imperial scourge" of the West, another way to degrade the worker's 
soul. But when the Velvet Revolution swept aside the Iron Curtain in 
1989, the scent of pot became a symbol of freedom, moving beyond the 
counterculture into an increasingly liberal mainstream. Hybrids were 
imported from the Netherlands, and Czechs experimented with potency, 
hydro-planting and the vagaries of bongs.

But Czechs were wary of sharing a good thing, and, with a history of 
oppression from the Habsburgs to the Nazis to the Communists, have 
long been suspicious of interlopers.

"There's a drug called Pervitin," said Martin Titman, a therapist at 
the Drop In, a drug counseling center in Prague. "It's a kind of 
amphetamine that was made in Germany during World War II to energize 
soldiers before battle. The recipe was lost in the 1960s, but the 
Czech underground discovered it and has kept it as a national 
treasure since. It won't share the recipe with German organized crime."

The same goes for American expatriates and others who arrived in 
Prague after the fall of communism as a "soft drug" tourism market 
evolved alongside the more insular marijuana culture of native Czechs.

A raconteur with a cantankerous side, Dolezal, who reminds a listener 
that his writings helped shape the nation's marijuana culture, 
doesn't want a bunch of stoned, goofy-faced tourists roaming around 
Prague Castle and falling into the Vltava River. Despite his 
entreaties, however, dealers whisper in alleys at night, selling a 
gram of this, a bag of that, to Russians, Brits and Americans.

"We want to legalize marijuana," said Dolezal, tapping on his coffee 
table to check the turtle. "But we can't sell it in cafes like in 
Amsterdam because we'd get all the unemployed Germans coming here. We 
don't want foreigners consuming marijuana in public. It could demean 
marijuana. We like the system where a friend gives it to, or sells it 
to, his friends."

Mravcik estimates that about 12 tons of marijuana are smoked each 
year in this country of 10.2 million people. Its prevalence among 
young people has doubled since 1995, he says. Unlike heroin and 
amphetamines, marijuana is not classified as high risk, but it is 
raising concern in a country where drug treatment centers didn't 
begin in earnest until 2001.

"We don't think marijuana is a gate to other drugs," Titman, the drug 
therapist, said. "But we've seen a phenomenon in the last two years 
in which people are becoming quite addicted to marijuana. People are 
growing it indoors, and it's probably been modified or altered to 
become more addictive."

Costing as little as $5 a gram, marijuana is cut and rolled 
throughout Czech society. "There's seven profiles of marijuana 
smokers: computer programmers, environmental activists, university 
students, teenagers, villagers in Moravia who now smoke joints 
instead of drinking plum brandy, reggae music listeners and 
80-year-old ladies buying marijuana for their husbands who have 
Parkinson's and other illnesses," Titman said.

The other day at Cafe Slavia, where decades ago the conversation 
typically focused on political revolt, two guys sat in the morning 
sunlight and talked about hashish in Norway, pot in Switzerland and 
how Ecstasy had become the cheapest drug. Then they laughed at their 
excellent adventure -- smoking 15 grams of marijuana during a 
snowboarding weekend.

"That was a lot," said one of them, Miroslav Kodada, a university 
student. "I started smoking in the eighth grade. On my 16th birthday, 
we smoked and I couldn't stop laughing for three hours and it really 
irritated me. But a few days ago, on Dec. 31, I stopped smoking. I'm 
in my last year at school, and I thought if I smoked I wouldn't make 
it through. I used to smoke 1 to 2 grams a day."

"I had my first marijuana harvest when I was 16," said Kodada's 
friend, Stepan Rybin, an economics major. "I planted it and it was 
successful. I don't think anyone in Europe drinks or smokes as much as Czechs."

Kodada, a willowy young man with shoulder-length hair, said society 
had changed. "It's more liberal and open. Under communism you could 
only drink and have sex at home."

"You're slower when you smoke a lot, though," Rybin said amid 
clattering cups and shuffling waiters. "Your reaction time is longer, 
and then there's the motivation syndrome."

Across town, it's just after dusk when Dolezal settles into his chair 
and lights a joint the size of a cigarillo. The scent whirls, and he 
is happy. His dog hasn't budged on the bed. His turtle is 
half-submerged in the coffee table, where Dolezal has scattered 
pictures submitted to the magazine Reflex, which recently held a 
contest for the best photo of a marijuana plant.

"Look at these -- beautiful," he says. "Plants are just like wines. 
You have darks and whites. The whites are most popular. The white 
widow, white shark, sweet tooth. Ahhh, the white widow is my favorite."

Dolezal sees himself as a prophet whose vision has been realized. He 
wrote against the repression of marijuana for years, pushing the 
topic beyond the counterculture. But the counterculture, at least the 
marijuana side if it, has gone bourgeois, and Dolezal has moved on to 
other issues, such as ranting against the caviar trade and the 
concept of "intelligent design," which he contends is a factor in 
keeping the United States out of the "group of civilized countries."

But marijuana is never far from his thoughts. He inhales. He picks up 
a plant bud and a magnifying glass. "Look at this," he says. He pulls 
a sprig from above the door. It's a plant from another era, before 
hydro-planting, chemical manipulation and meticulous cultivation.

"This is what we grew during the Bolshevik times," he says. "It's a 
typical ganja plant. These days we use it only for decoration."
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake