cannthropology
WORLD OF Cannabis PRESENTS
Amsterdam’s Reefer Revolution 58
How a handful of activists and entrepreneurs transformed the Venice of the North into the Cannabis capital of the world.
LEAFMAGAZINES.COM
If there’s one city in all the world most associated with marijuana, it is undoubtedly Amsterdam. For decades, the city has been known for its liberal attitudes toward Cannabis … but it was not always this way. The Dutch policy of Cannabis tolerance—and the resulting coffeeshop industry— traces back to a handful of counterculture visionaries in the late 60s and early 70s who pushed back against the powersthat-be and paved the way for the thriving Cannabis culture that followed. THE PROVOS Like America’s Diggers and Yippies (whom they influenced), Amsterdam’s Provos (short for provoceren, meaning “to provoke”) were a leftist group that combined political protests with absurdist street theater in an attempt to goad authority figures into making public fools of themselves. One of their founders was a performance artist and anti-tobacco activist named Robert Jasper Grootveld. Starting in the early 1960s, Grootveld and his Provos launched a guerilla war against the tobacco industry, as well as a pro-pot disinformation campaign called the “Marihuettegame” (marijuana game). The premise was to score “points” by tricking police into arresting you for legal substances that looked similar to weed to demonstrate their ignorance about it. Those points could then be redeemed for real weed at the Afrikaanse Druk Stoor—an underground drug shop they opened in the Jordaan in 1963.
JUN. 2021
Dutch pot pioneers: Kees Hoekert and Provo Jasper Grootveld of the Lowland Weed Company selling Cannabis plants on their houseboat The White Raven. COURTESY COR JARING LOWLAND WEED COMPANY After the Provos disbanded in 1967, Grootveld partnered with a kindred spirit by the name of Kornelis “Kees” Hoekert. Like Grootveld, Hoekert was a disgruntled tobacco addict who’d switched to smoking weed and hash. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much Cannabis available in the Netherlands at that time—just imported black-market hash, typically of questionable quality. Remarkably, it was Hoekert who first realized that Cannabis didn’t need to be imported—it could actually be grown anywhere, including there in Holland. So in 1969, he and Grootveld bought a kilo of hemp seed pigeon feed from a pet store and began planting it everywhere—in the forests, in the parks, by the airport, and even in front of police stations. More significantly, though, they grew thousands of plants out on the deck of Hoekert’s houseboat (The White Raven) and began selling seeds and plants as the Lowland Weed Company. The plants had no THC and weren’t suitable for smoking—it was just political theater designed to educate and trick authorities into creating a bogus scandal. But since Holland’s Opium Act (their version of the Controlled Substances Act) only forbade the sale of dried Cannabis leaves, not seeds or live plants, the police never took the bait. Nevertheless, they achieved their desired result: The police’s lack of action led people to conclude that Cannabis was now legal to grow in the Netherlands—making the Lowlands Weed Company the country’s first “legal” Cannabis merchants. The publicity also drew Cannabis enthusiasts from around the world to the White Raven. It became such an attraction that a hippie tour
