editorial comment and there, as elsewhere, we will see useless politicians inventing drug problems, becasue, well, the country is doing well, a situation untenable for the regular politico......

The man with the dancing eyebrows and the blurry tattoo stands in the chilled night and opens the barred gate to his apartment. A dog sleeps on the bed; a snapping turtle floats inside a glass coffee table. A hot light glows in the bathroom, where 11 marijuana plants ripple like a tiny field against the porcelain.

J.X. Dolezal, a Czech version of the late Hunter S. Thompson who has written books such as How to Take Drugs and Stoned County, opens a box. There's a scrape and grind, a sprinkle across paper, a nimble roll of fingers, a lick, a match strike, a curl of smoke and a smile.

"Do you mind?" asks Dolezal, his face slightly obscured as he exhales. "Excuse me if I don't offer you any. This marijuana's often too strong for my visitors. I had to resuscitate one guy for almost an hour once. You know, a higher percentage of people here grow their own marijuana than probably anywhere. It's typically Czech: a do-it-yourself nation."

The nation's cannabis culture is imbued with the ethos of the hippie movement: guys growing dope in fields and on balconies, and sharing with friends.

"I've never paid for pot, and I never would," said Filip Hubacek, a university student majoring in social sciences. "I don't mind paying for my gym, but not for my pot."


A legal debate

Selling or offering marijuana is illegal here, but the law is permeable.

It's not a crime to possess "no amount larger than a small amount," according to the statute. The metric rationalizations and extrapolations around such an ambiguous definition are debated with gleeful fervor amid smoke wisps in clubs.

"We have to be concerned with the use of marijuana," said Viktor Mravcik, director of a national agency that studies drug use and addiction. "It's becoming a political problem. ... One of our targets is to stop marijuana and Ecstasy in the young population."

Marijuana and other drugs weren't widespread during the Cold War. The communist regime considered pot an "imperial scourge" of the West, another degradation to the worker's soul.

But when the Velvet Revolution swept away the Iron Curtain in 1990, marijuana became a symbol of freedom, moving beyond the counterculture to an increasingly liberal mainstream.

The buzz on weed was out. But Czechs are wary of sharing and suspicious of interlopers.


Don't want stoned tourists

A raconteur with a cantankerous side, Dolezal, who reminds a listener that his writings helped shape the nation's marijuana culture, doesn't want a bunch of stoned, goofy-faced tourists roaming around the castles and falling into the Vltava River.

Despite his entreaties, olive-skinned dealers whisper in alleys at night, selling a gram of this, a bag of that to Russians, Brits and Americans.

"We want to legalize marijuana," Dolezal said. "But we can't sell it in cafes like in Amsterdam, because we'd get all the unemployed Germans coming here. We don't want foreigners consuming marijuana in public. ... We like the system where a friend gives it to or sells it to his friends."

Mravcik estimates about 12 tons of marijuana is smoked each year in this country of 10.2 million people.

Unlike heroin and amphetamines, marijuana is not classified as high-risk, but it is raising concern in a country where drug treatment centers didn't begin in earnest until 2001.

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