At the Green House coffee shop, you can buy marijuana and hashish in little plastic bags for $12 at the bar. Or you can get a joint from the wall-mounted "Reefer" dispensing machine. Across the street, the Laughing Pope shop sells "organic drugs" -- psychedelic mushrooms and two dozen varieties of cannabis. It's all legal.

With his shoulder-length hair and baggy cotton pants, Peter Blanken looks at home in this Haight-Ashbury-ish neighborhood in the Netherlands' second-biggest city. In fact, he runs an unusual research project, which gathers data on the city's hard-drug subculture in its native setting. He works for the Addiction Research Institute of Rotterdam, a cooperative effort of Erasmus University, the city health service, and two foundations.

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