Heart of Dankness Read online

  Although there are approximately two hundred coffeeshops in all shapes and sizes scattered across Amsterdam, Haarlemmerstraat is where the big names have parked their flagship storefronts. They’re lined up, like a Las Vegas strip in miniature, all within a couple of blocks of one another. Barney’s and Green House, easily the two biggest and best-known coffeeshops in the world, and the smaller but no less spectacular De Dampkring, have all built trendy and luxurious palaces for the consumption of cannabis on this stretch of street.

  Barney’s looks a lot like a bar in the lobby of a swank hotel, complete with computer screens at tables offering sightseeing tips, while Green House has a clear glass floor so you walk over an aquarium filled with decorative koi. De Dampkring is the techno choice, sleek and stripped down, high tech and minimalist with lots of brushed steel.

  The idea of coffeeshops, places that sell cannabis and hashish over the counter, might seem unusual to most North Americans, like it’s somehow shady, the kind of place where you might fall in with the wrong crowd. But when you enter one, they are, for the most part, similar to friendly cafés or restaurants anywhere in the world. Once you get past that initial Drug Abuse Resistance Education–inoculated uncertainty, coffeeshops are actually nice places to hang out in.

  Before I left Los Angeles, I spent hours skimming back issues of High Times, Skunk, Weed World, and Cannabis Culture magazines not, as you might think, to ogle the glossy color photos of the various Miss High Times or 420 Girls—not that there’s anything wrong with hot young women sucking on bongs or covering their breasts with pot leaves—but to get some kind of clue as to which coffeeshop in Amsterdam had the best reputation for quality. I canvassed people who’d attended the previous Cannabis Cup. I consulted strain developers and growers.

  I heard a lot of names. In addition to the big three, there were Dutch Flowers, De Tweede Kamer, Green Place, Amnesia, and a few others, but one coffeeshop in particular kept being mentioned as a place for consistently superior cannabis: Grey Area, owned and operated by an American aficionado of all things cannabis named Jon Foster.

  It wasn’t easy to pin Jon down. He was busy, which I understood, and naturally skeptical of random guys who claim to be writing a book, which I also understood. But when I told him I was interested in dankness and what that meant, he became intrigued and agreed to meet me.

  I strolled alongside the Singel canal until I came to Oude Leliestraat, the little street where Grey Area is located. It was almost noon and a group of young Americans, college students doing their semester abroad, were milling around, waiting for the door to open so they could begin their afternoon. A couple on their honeymoon stood in front of the window holding hands and making out, oblivious to everything but each other.

  Jon arrived, right on time, riding his bicycle up to the front of the shop and dismounting with a practiced flourish. He’s a good-looking guy, tall and thin, and on his bike he could easily pass for a local. Maybe that’s because he’s lived in Holland for almost fifteen years now. We shook hands and he opened the shop for business.

  For a place that is renowned by cannabis connoisseurs as the mecca for the best weed in the world, Grey Area doesn’t look the part. For starters, it’s tiny. You couldn’t park a car in the space—not an American car anyway. It has seating for maybe a dozen people and there is barely room behind the counter for the budtender to stand. Compared to the grand and luxurious decor at Green House and Barney’s—upscale coffeeshops obviously owned by people with money to spend—Grey Area’s furnishings are distinctly dinette set. And where Green House and Barney’s have exotic art covering their walls, the walls of Grey Area are splattered—every square inch—with stickers. There are stickers for bands, punk shows, reggae festivals, motor oil, porn stars, restaurants, and random things that I was unable to decipher. Even a couple of old All Access passes to a Willie Nelson concert are slapped up on the wall. It sounds like it might cause your head to explode, but it’s actually kind of cool. It’s not as if the walls were covered with stickers when Grey Area first opened or it’s some kind of trompe l’oeil gimmick painted by a professional; the stickers have grown on the walls organically, forming an archeological history of the customers who’ve visited.

  It reminded me of the famous “Bubble Gum Alley” in San Luis Obispo, California. For more than forty years people have walked down an alley just off Higuera Street in the small central coast town and stuck their chewing gum on the brick wall. It’s now a tsunami of gum, a museum of mastication, a minty monument to saliva and latex—and has somehow become a tourist attraction.

  I like the no-frills vibe of Grey Area. It’s similar to those fabulous old record stores like Bleecker Bob’s in New York’s West Village or Championship Vinyl, the record shop depicted in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. There’s a whack-a-doodle aesthetic at work there. It’s an idiosyncratic temple to herb on a stylish European street and looks like a grad student’s clubhouse.

  If Green House and Barney’s are the superstar rock bands of the cannabis world, the glittering palaces of ganja where most of the tourists go, then Grey Area is the indie rock favorite of the hipster cognoscenti.

  Jon Foster thinks that’s the point.

  “We’re a friendly, kinda lo-fi, living-room-type feeling place. And the combination of really dank weed with a dank atmosphere is really what brings it to another level.”

  There’s that word again.

  “What do you mean by ‘dank’?”

  Jon smiled and adjusted his chunky glasses. He pulled off his baseball cap, ran a hand across his head, and then reset his cap. He does that a lot when he’s thinking, and he’s a thoughtful guy. He reminded me of the smart, cool dude you knew in college who wasn’t necessarily the life of the party but always knew where the parties were.

  “ ‘Dank’ is a word people use that’s kinda undefined.”

  I wanted to interrupt him, to tell him about the University of Oregon’s Linguistic Department, but he wasn’t done. He was as curious about what “dank” means, on a practical and philosophical level, as I was.

  “On a basic level the dankest weed, of course, comes from the strain type. A lot of people have told me you can only get so much out of a seed from, say, an unknown Mexican plant. You can grow that inside with a lot of care and it will still only be as good as, you know, what it is.”

  You hear people in the cannabis industry talk a lot about “strains.” Botanically speaking, the term has no official significance: It’s a catchall word that refers to the offspring of a plant that shares some characteristics with the parent plants. A more accurate term would be “varietal,” which the wine industry uses to distinguish among different types of grapes. For example, sauvignon blanc, cabernet franc, merlot, Riesling, and zinfandel are all different grape varietals. The same can be said about cannabis and, believe me, the difference between a heavy indica and a light sativa is as profound as the difference between a fat red cabernet sauvignon and a tart, effervescent vinho verde.

  Jon adjusted his baseball cap again. He’d given my question some serious thought and his answer surprised me.

  “I feel like the dankest weed has a situational component to it. For example, the best weed I ever had was something someone grew outside and it was a gift and I was on holiday with my girlfriend, relaxing in a beautiful atmosphere, and all that really enhances the experience and really brought it a step up.”

  I looked around the diminutive coffeeshop and saw the college students relaxing around a table, drinking orange Fantas, and sharing a bong. The honeymooning couple were smoking a spliff and looking at a map of the city, trying to decide between visiting the Van Gogh Museum or the Sex Museum. Old-school jazz played softly in the background. The vibe was peaceful, serene, and timeless because the clock on the wall has been stuck at 4:20 for the past decade.

  I realized that Jon was like a good chef, trying to control the “front of the house” experience for his customers, the situational factors that he believes contr
ibute to dankness.

  “That’s why I like working in the shop. You see the people, you make a connection with them,” he said. “And they’re all happy because they’re on vacation, experiencing something that maybe they’ve never experienced before. They’re feeling positive and it makes me feel positive, too.”

  It’s true that he’s almost always smiling.

  Grey Area is the only coffeeshop in Amsterdam that’s owned and operated by an American, and I’m curious what strange twist of fate brought a nice young man from Rhode Island all the way to Holland.

  “I was a drummer in a band called Love Box. We came over here to make a go of it, and I kind of stuck around.”

  Lots of musicians come to Europe to find audiences and play. Not many of them open coffeeshops. “Where did that impulse come from? I’m assuming they didn’t offer Budtending 101 at Wesleyan.”

  “The concept was that this would be a vehicle for the music side—we’d have an income from this and could pursue the music. I’m still doing that, trying to balance everything. This is my livelihood so I can do my art.”

  I would argue that his coffeeshop is his true artistic expression, but perhaps it’s more complicated than that.

  What makes Grey Area different from the other coffeeshops in Amsterdam is not just the size of the place—it’s the size of their menu. While most have dozens, if not hundreds, of cannabis varieties on their menu, Grey Area limits their offerings to eight or nine strains of marijuana and three or four kinds of hash. That means that Jon is incredibly discerning about what he sells in the shop. He must know what he’s doing, as Grey Area consistently wins at the Cannabis Cup. That judgment isn’t influenced by the situational elements; that’s having some really dank weed.

  Jon explained that Grey Area only sources and sells the highest quality cannabis available from select, small growers who grow the plants with what he describes as “love.” He’s not interested in what’s popular or trendy in the weed world, and because he buys small lots, he can get odd and exotic strains, like a rare, and unnamed, equatorial sativa he had recently.

  “We like to give new strains a run. We like to take risks, take the plunge, and see if it’s something for the future. First we’ll have our idea of what it is and then we put it to the public and see what they think. What helps us keep the weed on a really good level is to work with people who have an interest and a love for the product. It’s artisanal cannabis.”

  Cannabis, artisanal or not, is technically illegal in the Netherlands. Not that you’d know it from walking down the street. The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs explains Dutch drug laws and the rationale behind them on its website.

  They make a distinction between hard drugs, “substances which involve an unacceptable health risk, such as ecstasy, cocaine and heroin,” and cannabis. Possession of cannabis for personal use—up to thirty grams—is a minor offense that is rarely, if ever, enforced.

  One of the Dutch government’s aims is to “separate the markets for hard drugs and cannabis.” The government wants to protect casual cannabis users from “exposure to more harmful drugs.” In other words, when I go to my local drug dealer to buy some weed, she usually has cocaine, LSD, mushrooms, and other substances for sale, but if I go to a coffeeshop, it’s just cannabis and soft drinks. You can’t even get a beer—the ultimate gateway drug—in a coffeeshop. It’s a sensible and pragmatic approach that understands that people like to get high and that marijuana and hashish are not any different from alcohol.

  Here’s how the Ministry of Foreign Affairs says it: “The main aim of Dutch policy is to reduce both the demand for and supply of drugs, and to minimize any harm to users, the people with whom they associate, and the public in general.” I especially like minimize any harm to users.

  Although I’d prefer outright legalization of cannabis, if you have to have restrictions, what the Dutch call their “soft drug” policy seems to be a reasonable compromise. There is no rational reason why an adult should face fines and jail time for consuming a nontoxic plant in the privacy of his or her own home. The fact that, in the United States, there are people serving ten-year prison terms for growing marijuana plants in their backyards while Wall Street racketeers, who have defrauded millions of people and destroyed the global economy, walk free is a kind of bizarre hypocrisy that boggles my mind.

  But if weed is technically illegal in Holland, what is, technically, a coffeeshop? Again, I turn to the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  “A coffee shop is an establishment where cannabis may be sold subject to certain strict conditions, but no alcoholic drinks may be sold or consumed. Although the sale of cannabis is an offense, coffee shops are not prosecuted provided they sell small quantities only and comply with the rules listed in C2.”

  Here are the rules:

  • They may not sell more than five grams per person per day.

  • They may not sell ecstasy or other hard drugs.

  • They may not advertise drugs.

  • They must ensure that there is no nuisance in their vicinity.

  • They may not sell drugs to persons under eighteen or even allow them on the premises.

  In addition to that, “coffee shops may stock up to 500 grams of cannabis without facing prosecution,” which, as a busy coffeeshop will tell you, isn’t that much weed. That’s why most coffeeshops keep apartments or storage units nearby, and send runners for resupply when their inventory gets low.

  According to Dutch government figures from 2008, there are 730 coffeeshops in the country, more than 200 of them in Amsterdam. It’s hard to walk through the city center and not see a coffeeshop or two; they’re right next to restaurants, bars, hair salons, and retail stores. If you don’t see them, you can smell them—the sweet aroma of burning weed drifts in the air. Amsterdammers don’t try to hide anything. Like the hookers in the red-light district, coffeeshops are part of the fabric of the city and a big part of the local economy. In 2008, coffeeshops in the Netherlands paid approximately 400 million euros in tax on gross sales of more than 2 billion euros. That’s more money than the Dutch transportation system earns, and makes coffeeshops one of the biggest industries in the country. And that’s not counting the four million tourists who come for the weed and stay in hotels, eat at restaurants, drink in bars, and visit museums, or the tens of millions of dollars generated from the sale of cannabis seeds.

  Putting aside the humanitarian aspects of the Dutch policy, that’s some serious financial incentive to keep the bongs bubbling.

  But why do the Dutch have this policy and every other country is more like the United States?

  “We Dutch don’t like authority.”

  With that pronouncement, Joop Hazenberg, journalist, former Dutch government insider, founder of the political think tank Denktank Prospect, and author of the book Change: How the Millennial Generation Will Conquer the Netherlands, spread some liverwurst on a piece of brown bread.

  I can’t say I’m crazy about liverwurst. Liver is one of the few foods that I actively dislike; the smell induces a deep-seated revulsion that has more to do with my mother’s bad cooking and my father’s rage issues at the dinner table then the slimy brown stuff itself, but I decided to take a Dutch attitude and try to be tolerant.

  Judging by the current standards of modern American journalism, Joop is CNN anchor handsome, with olive skin and dark eyes that flash with an intelligent, mischievous twinkle. “We’re always finding little ways around the laws. Not because we’re criminals, but because we don’t like to be told what to do.”

  He mashed the brown bread down with the palm of his hand, and a shiny blob of liverwurst oozed out.

  “Like the tobacco smoking ban in bars and cafés. Two-thirds of them don’t care. People smoke. When the government tries to catch them, everyone sends SMS messages on their cell phones to warn that the inspectors are coming.”

  I put a slice of cheese on a piece of brown bread—an action that would become a recurrin
g theme of my stay in Holland—and looked around. We were sitting at the communal dining table in the center of a large workspace shared by a group of freelance writers. Scattered throughout the floor of the building, which overlooked the Oudezijds Voorburgwal canal, were five or six desks with diverse levels of neatness. Some were clean, almost barren; others were buried under piles of paper, books, and knickknacks.

  The floor was bare concrete, the walls unadorned except for an old movie poster from Casablanca tacked to the wall above the table and a large swatch of glittery purple fabric randomly draped along another. Bookshelves acted as room dividers and were stacked with magazines, old newspapers, and half-eaten boxes of cookies. There was an air of dilapidated faculty lounge about the place: It was part clubhouse and part creative commons, and I couldn’t help wishing I had a desk in some corner.

  Because Amsterdam boasts a large creative community, these kinds of arrangements are becoming more and more common, said Joop. They are called, and I think the irony is unintentional, “freelance offices.”

  I was having lunch with Joop because I was curious how Holland had become such a tolerant society. Here’s a country that is a right-wing American’s worst nightmare. Holland has socialized health care, gay marriage, legal prostitution, euthanasia, and coffeeshops where you can smoke marijuana. And, just to rub it in, its people are ranked among the happiest in the world.

  “From the beginning we have always worked together. We had to. You tolerate a lot of differences when you’re fighting to keep the sea from flooding your country.”

  I nodded and took a bite of my cheese sandwich. Netherlands means, literally, “low lands.” It’s a country that’s mostly at or below sea level, the ocean held back by a series of dikes, embankments, and canals.

  Joop held his liverwurst sandwich in the air—he was caught mid-thought. He put the sandwich back on the plate. “I think that’s where it began. But then we have always been a country of successful traders and businessmen. The Portuguese Jews came here in the sixteenth century, the Huguenots after them. There are always communities of people coming. You can’t be a successful trading nation without being open to the world and tolerant of other cultures.”