Words and photos by Elaine Brière
Briarpatch Magazine
February 2008
“Here, we have Dutch cannabis, Moroccan hash, and Lebanese red hash.”
Pieter van der Camp gestures to the neatly packaged, labelled, rolled and ready-to-smoke cannabis products that are his stock-in-trade. He is owner of the marijuana coffeeshop Pas Op! (Watch Out!) in the picturesque municipality of Schiedam on the outskirts of Rotterdam. Coffeeshops like Pas Op! are now at the centre of a national debate about legalizing the growing of cannabis. Though the sale of marijuana through coffeeshops has been quasi-legal in the Netherlands for 30 years, the “backdoor” supply of the drug has remained illegal.
