SWISS HEMP -- HEIDI HIGH

Independent Magazine
September 1995
by Mike Bygrave

Five hundred years of democracy, said Orson Welles contemptuously,
and Switzerland has produced....the cuckoo clock. Orson, you spoke too
soon. Unknown to all but the drug cognoscenti, Switzerland is now the only
country in Europe to grow cannabis legally and unsupervised by government.
You can make food and clothing from it. You can even smoke it. In the
summer of 1967, a full-page advertisement appeared in the Times calling
for the legalisation of marijuana. Paid for by Paul McCartney, it was
signed by all the Beatles plus a roster of high-powered Sixties' names,
including Francis Crick, who discovered DNA, the psychiatrists Anthony
Storr and RD Laing, the future MP Jonathan Aitken and the late Graham
Greene.

Talk about a lost cause. When the advertisement was re-run in
1992, with many of the same signatories, not only was marijuana still
illegal but Britain was committed to an American-style "war on drugs."
The official line on dope, weed, pot, ganja, grass, puff, cannabis, reefer
or hemp--the various names for marijuana--has remained hard. Last year,
Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, increased the maximum fine for
possession from 500 Pounds to 2500 pounds. The tabloid press pilloried the
Liberal Democrats for debating a motion to decriminalise (as opposed to
legalise) marijuana; and the flak was still flying this summer when
Labour attacked Lib-Dem Chris Davies at the Littleborough and Saddleworth
by-election for being "soft on drugs" (Davies won, anyway).

So why do so many people still believe cannabis will soon be
legal--first in Europe, then the UK? According to Mike Goodman, the
director of Release, which has campaigned against the British drugs laws
since the Sixties, much has already changed in Britain. He says that the
law is being enforced, but often with reluctance: "It depends where you
get caught. There are parts of Wales and various rural areas where you'll
certainly go to court for possessing cannabis and get a fairly stiff fine"
(though seldom anything like Howard's draconian 2500 Pounds). "In other
areas, such as London, you'd be unlikely even to get a caution. 'Informal
disposal' is more likely, which means the police throw it down the drain."
Goodman points out that, since politicians continue to be obdurate, the
responsibility for developing a rational policy on cannabis falls upon an
alliance of the police, the courts and public opinion.

Despite this typical British fudge, he warns, there are numerous
casualties. "Contrary to popular belief, more and more people are
prosecuted for cannabis offences every year. It's up from around 20,000 in
1985 to around 50,000 today and, although the police claim the biggest rise
is in the number of cautions, there is also a steady increase in people
going to court."

According to the police--and Goodman agrees--this is largely
because of the enormous rise in smokers. An Exeter University study,
published in July, found that 32.9 % of boys and 27.3% of girls aged
between 15 and 16 had smoked pot, a threefold increase since 1989. If
cannabis does become legal in the UK, it will be because of the sheer
weight of statistics like these. Even Keith Hellawell, hard-line chariman
of the Association of Chief Police Officers' drugs committee, says that
drug use has become "an endemic and ingrained" part of British youth
culture.

Establishment attitudes have altered more quickly in Europe,
although, as in Britain, it remains more a question of regional variations
and de facto decriminalisation than of an outright change in the law.
Smoking cannabis is tolerated in parts of Germany, Switzerland and, of
course, Amsterdam, where 450 coffee houses have been selling it on a
quasi-legal basis since 1976. Advertising is not allowed, users must be
18, and there are penalties for dealing outside a licensed place. But
police turn a blind eye on how the coffee shops get the stuff. In recent
years, as America's war on drugs has become ever more punitive and
hysterical, some of America's top marijuana growers have moved to Holland.
Paradoxically, their highly visible presence, together with the waves of
"drug-tourists" visiting Holland for hard as well as soft drugs, has led
to calls for tougher law enforcement.

In Germany, liberalisation is just beginning. After a federal
court ruling last year, the state of Schleswig-Holstein has come up with a
new model for cannabis law. Horrifying conservatives, it has suggested
that cannabis be sold legally in chemists' shops. Already, authorities in
northern German states rarely prosecute anyone in possession of less than
30 grams.

In Switzerland, Andy Stafforte, vice-president of the Swiss
organisation Friends of Hemp, declares that it's cool to smoke in Zurich,
Basle, Lucerne, Bern and St. Gallen, "but you can only go so far." Police
ignored a pot-smokers' cafe which opened in Bern, then busted the owners
when they boasted of their activities to the press. This makes the
position of a man like Bernie Stocker all the more intriguing. In his
early thirties, balding and bespectacled, Stocker looks like a bank clerk,
In fact, he is something even more conservative: a Swiss farmer, but a
farmer whose crop is marijuana. At his family farmhouse in Rain, six miles
outside Lucerne, a miniature Swiss flag flies atop a marijuana plant
sitting on the dining table. Down the road, a whole field of such plants
is shooting up among his cows and his corn. For the first time this year,
[1995] along with more than 100 other farmers spread across western and
northern Switzerland, Bernie Stocker is growing pot legally for a living.

"I read an advertisement for it in the farmers; newspaper," he
explains. "It was new. I liked the look of the plant. Swiss agriculture
needs new products and new markets. There was still some ambivalence in my
mind between hemp and drug abuse, but I read a book about it and I realised
that was just propaganda put out by the Americans."

To Stocker, it is crucial that he calls his crop "hemp" rather
than marijuana: he sees himself as part of what is loosely described as
the European Hemp Movement. "Hempers" such as Stocker are interested in
the numerous non-drug products that can be made from marijuana. Stocker
says that he has never smoked a joint and doesn't want to, although he
admits that his wife is experimenting with a cannabis cookbook. To the
Stockers, hemp is just another potential cash crop. Or is it? Critics of
the Hemp Movement say it is a ploy to legalise cannabis under another name.
They point out that, if farmers are allowed to grow marijuana willy-nilly,
the cannabis laws will become a farce.

While police in many European countries have become less willing to
prosecute smokers, they are keen to pursue the cultivators, whether amateur
or professional. In Britain, says Mike Goodman, there has been "an
enormous increase" in prosecutions for cultivation. In Amsterdam, the
high-tech American growers--whose dope, with brand-names like "skunk",
"bubblegum" and "Northern Lights," is exceptionally strong--have to
conduct their experiments indoors. But the Hemp Movement needs the great
outdoors, and it has always been stymied by the image of illegality--until
now.

In Switzerland, hemp is an old tradition: Swiss farmers grew their
own until the early Sixties, when the custom died out with the start of
global panic over drugs. Now, it appears, the law was never changed. "Ja,
Ja, this is it exactly," admits Josef Ackermann, vice--director at the
Swiss Ministry of Agriculture. "Until two years ago, nobody noticed.
Switzerland is not part of the EC or a signatory to the relevant
international conventions. Under Swiss law, Ackermann explains, "you have
to look that you don't produce hemp for drugs, which is forbidden, but not
if you produce hemp for anything else."

The man who discovered this remarkable legal loophole is
Jean-Pierre Egger, a renegade Swiss lawyer and self-appointed "people's
tribune," for whom hemp is the latest of many causes. Together with an
adventurous American woman, Shirin Patterson, he has formed the Swiss Hemp
Trading Company (Swihtco). It was Swihtco which placed the advertisement
Bernie Stocker read, and Swihtco which later sold Stocker and his fellow
farmers their seeds and contracted to buy their harvests. To the farmers,
hemp may be a crop like any other, but, for Swihtco, their conversion is
highly significant. Swihtco has two objectives: to create a multi-million
dollar hemp industry, and to blow wide open the issue of legalising
cannabis.

This would be a tall order for a multi-national corporation, let
alone two obscure individuals with limited private incomes and interesting
pasts. Egger qualified as a lawyer in 1973 but never practised
conventionally. He toured Asia by motorbike, became an environmtntal
activist, and then worked for the World Wildlife Fund in Geneva. But, he
says, he tried to expose a money-laundering scam and, as a result, the WWF
got rid of him. Then he was disbarred in Geneva. He turned to defending
pot-smokers, later earning himself a three-month jail sentence in Geneva
(which he is appealing) for passing out cannabis leaves in the street. He
was becoming known for his command of Swiss drug law, as well as his
constant provocations of authority, when Friends of Hemp sent Shirin
Patterson to see him. The daughter of a wealthy American anaesthetist who
had worked in Iran (hence her Persian name), she was looking for a
business to start when she met Egger, heard about the Swiss loophole and
founded Swihtco with him.

They make an odd couple. Egger talks in diatribes, which usually
involve the Yankees polluting the planet. He's a sort of modern-day
Danton, an all-purpose provocateur with the character of a trial lawyer,
only comfortable on the attack. Whenever he speaks, Patterson, who must
have heard it all a thousand times, falls silent and stares at him as if
mesmerised. Although she's Swihtco's owner and sole financier, "she is
doing whatever Jean-Pierre is saying," as Andy Stafforte from Friends of
Hemp puts it.

When I met them at Stocker's farm, they arrived on a big BMW
touring bike. Egger is 46, clean-cut and square-jawed, with a resemblance
to the American movie star Tom Berenger. Patterson, 39, is quiet and
elfin. They quickly launched into a passionate description of hemp.
"There's an enormous potential market," Patterson enthused, "for
paper, clothing, food and fuel made from hemp; products for creams and
shampoos and other personal care items; sun blocks, construction
materials--you can build houses with this stuff. And Swiss farmers will
have the monopoly of the raw material."

Egger, who has been called "the apostle of cannabis" by Swiss
newspapers, adds: "The only thing this plant can't do is talk. You can
make clothes from it, edible oil and other foods--we're working with one of
Switzerland's top restaurants to put on a gourmet dinner with dishes made
of hemp. You can also make birdseed and food for livestock; it cures
asthma, it helps insomnia; there are medical uses for AIDS and cancer
patients..."

It used to be only aging hippies who raved about marijuana as if it
was the Phiolsopher's Stone. Now you hear such talk all over Europe from
disciples of the Hemp Movement. In Switzerland, hempers call the plant
"Swiss petrol," and tell you how Hitler literally ran his tanks on hemp.

Bill Barth, an Amsterdam-based American who wants to promote hemp culture
in developing countries, says, "all the Sixties true believers, the
hippies with a mission, are back, and this time they're flogging a good one
with hemp. Some of what they say is exaggerated. I've seen people hold up
a bottle [of cannabis oil] and say, 'this is the future of the world,' but
a lot of it is true. Hemp is a remarkable bio-resource that needs only
caveman technology to exploit it."

Calling marijuana "hemp" was the first PR move: it turned hemp
into pot with lace curtains. Now hemp shops, the modern version of hippie
"head shops," are opening up across Europe: ten already in Germany, three
in Switzerland. Numerous small companies are experimenting with hemp
products. Barth maintains that hemp has gone beyond hippies and is being
taken up by trendsetters. "Next, you're going to have a Paris fashion
designer do a couture collection in hemp."

Yet, for all the efforts of the Hemp Movement to sanitise its
image, critics say it remains a Trojan Horse for people who want to smoke
cannabis. Egger, for example, talks about the legitimate applications of
hemp yet is the legal advisor to Friends of Hemp, which is the main Swiss
dope users' association. Talk for ten minutes with most hempers, and
they've forgotten about relieving the suffering of cancer patients or
aiding the Third World--they're lecturing you on the basic human right to
get stoned out of your skull. Egger's defence is to claim that the sort of
hemp Swihtco grows doesn't make good dope (this is true, but plant strains
are developing all the time). He then changes tack and says that the
"grass" it does make gives a natural high, "like a morning coffee or a
tonic. It's an effect the lady of the house will appreciate when its 4 pm,
the children are playing, and she takes some relaxation."

Until Swihtco came along, it was assumed that growing cannabis for
whatever use was illegal throughout Europe, never mind the USA, where many
of Swihtco's farmers would face the death penalty for growing more than
60,000 plants. There are some minor exceptions to the laws, particularly
in France, where they grow a denatured "French hemp" with almost no THC
(the bit that gets you high). French hemp is no good for anything but
low-grade paper and fibreboard.

Under these circumstances, Egger and Patterson's discovery of the
Swiss loophole should have made them the patron saints of the Hemp
Movement. Instead, they say they've been ignored. "It's too big,"
Patterson says. "It's too incredible. No one can believe we can grow the
plant freely and legally in Switzerland, of all places."

Her "legal adviser" (as a smiling Egger styles himself) has a
different, more sinister, explanation. He blames the influence of the
American growers in Amsterdam, the most powerful group in the Hemp
Movement. As American drug enforcement got tougher, some of the top
growers went into voluntary exle in Holland. These are the men whose work
in plant-breeding in the past 20 years has turned marijuana into America's
biggest cash crop, worth an estimated (if disputed) $ 32 billion a year,
according to the New York Times. Every autumn, following the harvest,
Amsterdam's Cannabis Cup competition chooses the prize strains in an Oscars
ceremony for the dope world.

According to Egger, the Amsterdam Americans dismiss what's
happening in Switzerland because their own business thrives on prohibition.
"They have an underground mentality," he rails, "whereas we are free."
This isn't the whole story, however. Last year, after Swihtco's
first trial season, when ten Swiss farmers grew hemp for seed, Swihtco
advertised for foreign investors, targeting the Amsterdam Americans in
particular. Bill Barth, who says he was "testing the waters" for his
fellow expats, paid Swihtco 13,000 SFr (7,500 Pounds) to grow a hectare
of hemp from seeds produced in Amsterdam: the contract was signed in
Lausanne railway station. But in May this year, Patterson reported that
Barth's crop had failed. Barth says he is still waiting for the refund he
was promised.

Andy Stafforte, who is also the jovial, bearded owner of Bern's
hemp shop, defends Egger. "Jean-Pierre isn't greedy," he says, helpfully,
"he's very, very stingy. Really he can't get himself to put his hand in
his pocket. It's a Swiss illness. And he's a little bit dictatorial also.
New he's saying the Amsterdam people are dealers, not hempers.
Jean-Pierre is very black and white."

With both Patterson and Egger, figures are a grey area. This year,
[1995] there are either 135 or 120 or 111 farmers growing Swihtco hemp.
Each farmer, it seems, pays Swihtco 600 SFr a hectare for seeds and "legal
advice," and Swihtco contracts to buy the crop for 8,500 SFr a hectare
(corn prices, by comparison, are around 4,000 Sfr). Swihtco call
themselves "intermediaries" between the farmers and the markets but, a
month before the harvest, they had signed few contracts. They kept telling
me about the potential riches, but the only deals they seemed to have were
with Andy Stafforte's hemp shop and a mail-order scheme of their own
selling aromatherapy cushions stuffed with hemp.

They say that the Swiss authorities discourage business people from
dealing with them. Switzerland runs its own, small hemp programme,
subsidising farmers who grow hemp; but this is "French hemp," which
nobody seems to want. Though it has been running for several years, the
government programme has only attracted a paltry ten to 12 hectares each
year. Andy Stafforte, for one, thinks there is a hidden agenda: "What the
hell is the reason to grow fibre hemp in Switzerland where there is no
functioning machine to treat it and the textile factories that might use it
closed 20 years ago? I think the government only does it so they can say
to people, 'Look, we have tried it; it's worth nothing.' So I'm very
happy Swihtco is there to prove them wrong."

But Swihtco, too, is guilty of wishful thinking. In 1994, it was
reported that they had a "forward contract" with Migros, the Sainsbury's
of Switzerland, for 60 tons of hemp to make edible oil, but the contract
turned out to be merely a general expression of interest. Earlier this
year, they launched, then abandoned, an ambitious scheme to make textiles.
The scheme depended on government subsidies for Swihtco's natural hemp,
containing THC, which were promptly--and predictably--refused.
The hype and the hustle go with the territory. Egger and Patterson
are trying to conjure an entire industry into being using nothing but
willpower. Yet governments are not stupid. They know that any serious
hemp industry would make the marijuana laws even more of a nonsense than
they are already, and they will stop it. "There would be pressure from
other countries if Switzerland started to produce [on a large scale],"
says Josef Ackermann of the Swiss Agriculture Ministry, "and, if this
happens, then we change our law, The farmers won't prevent us. They get
too many subsidies for too many other crops and, if people say 'the farmers
produce drugs,' those subsidies will be cut."

The point is persuasive. Nor is it limited to Switzerland. The
Dutch, too, are under pressure from neighboring countries: the city of
Amsterdam is considering closing half the "coffeehouses," and the Dutch
government wants to cut the quantity of marijuana that can be sold without
prosecution from 30 to ten grammes.

But these are delaying tactics. The drive to decriminalise, and
then to legalise, cannabis has a fresh and, perhaps, unstoppable momentum.
People no longer buy the favorite argument of American drug enforcement
that marijuana is "a gateway drug which leads users on to cocaine and
heroin." They are starting to understand that each drug is different.

In any case, it is clear that current drugs policy is not based on
fears for people's health but on ideas about morality and public order. In
a couple of months' time, Release, always quick to size up the public mood,
will publish a new book, The Case for Cannabis, explaining in detail what
legalisation would mean. Mike Goodman recalls a seminar for senior police
officers in London: "One senior officer said, quite openly, that he
doesn't target suppliers of cannabis in his area because it's not a
priority for him any more--and it's not a priority because he doesn't
believe they're doing any harm to the community." A turning-point?

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