Highest holiday greetings from Amsterdam and Happy New Year to everybody. I’m writing from my favorite spot, the 420 Café, where I landed a month ago from New Orleans to find that the 27th Annual High Times Cannabis Cup has been seriously disrupted by the local authorities who claimed that the Cup’s organizers had failed to obtain the proper permits for its five-day exposition of cannabis and weed-related products and shut down the affair. It’s no secret that the Netherlands and its business partners in America and the European Union have been increasingly unhappy with the relatively wide-open public availability, vendition and smoking of weed in Amsterdam and in towns and…
Free The Weed
Free The Weed 45 by John Sinclair
Highest greetings from New Orleans, where I’m completing the last leg of my fall visit to the United States with a whirlwind of activity involving 9 performances in 7 days, most of them with the Carlo Ditta Trio & friends and the last one with pianist Tom Worrell. That’s why they call me the Hardest Working Poet In Show Business. I’ll get a good break in the action when I get back to Amsterdam for the Cannabis Cup, a full week of good clean fun in a temporary environment created by 2000 or so young American potheads who will have descended upon the city to sample as much good weed as…
Free The Weed 44 by John Sinclair
Highest greetings from New Haven, Connecticut, where I’m visiting my sister Kathy in the middle of a 3-week trip to the East Coast before ending up with a week in New York City and a train ride back to Detroit in time for the 50th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Detroit Artists Workshop on November 1, 1964. Just after I filed my last column I flew out to Portland, Oregon to perform at the Hempstalk Festival along with my man John Trudell and his band Bad Dog. They’ve been doing this for 20 years and just this year received the City’s approval to hold the event in a popular…
Free The Weed 43 by John Sinclair
I’d like to take a turn away from our usual conversation to commemorate the once-in-a-lifetime experience I’ll enjoy next month when we celebrate the founding of the Detroit Artists Workshop 50 years ago. This month I’ll celebrate my 73rd birthday on October 2nd, so I was 23 when we started the Artists Workshop as Detroit’s bohemian outpost and gathering place for a renegade artistic community that was creating a new way to make art and live and work together with other fellow seekers like ourselves. The Detroit Artists Workshop was a beautifully organic thing that grew directly out of the nexus of a wildly disparate group of creative individuals in their…
Free The Weed 42 by John Sinclair
Highest greetings from Amsterdam for the last time this summer. I’ll be spending a month in London to serve as a judge for the Dopefiend Cup at an undisclosed location at the end of August and play a concert in the Speigeltent at Canary Wharf in mid-September with a great British jazz ensemble called The Founder Effect. Then I’ll head back to Detroit to begin an action-packed fall schedule, and if you’re at all interested in following my progress around the United States from the Hempstock Festival in Portland, Oregon to the Maine Harvest Festival near Portland, Maine to Lowell Celebrates Kerouac in Massachusetts to New York City and back to…
Free The Weed 41 by John Sinclair
Highest greetings from Amsterdam, still the world capital of the cannabis culture despite all the efforts of the Dutch government to drive the marijuana industry back to the Stone Age, and notwithstanding the incredible gains being made at last in sections of the United States where citizens may finally buy their weed over the counter without interference by the drug police. Before I say anything else I’d like to thank my publisher, Ben Horner, and all the marijuana people in my home town of Flint, Michigan—where I smoked my first joint over 50 years ago—for their brilliant efforts in attracting the High Times Medical Cannabis Cup to the former Vehicle City…
Free The Weed 40 by John Sinclair
Highest greetings from the Mediterranean coast of Italy, where I’m visiting my friends Jerry Poynton and Helen Oliver Adelson, the great American painter, at their rustic place in the countryside outside of Tarquiia, Italy, just an hour north and west of Rome. I flew in from Amsterdam through an incredible storm that cleared up just before we landed at Leonardo da Vinci airport, but now I’m relaxing in the bucolic serenity of the Etruscan countryside and enjoying the radio program (#553) I made at the 420 Café before leaving Amsterdam that’s posted on my internet radio station at www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.com. Radio Free Amsterdam has been my leading passion in life for the…
Free The Weed 39 – by John Sinclair
Highest greetings from London, where it’s still a crime to smoke and possess cannabis products and the medical use of marijuana is not yet recognized by the forces of the Crown. Like the guy at Customs told me a couple of years ago when he seized my medically prescribed cannabis in its official Dutch medical container and refused my offer to present my Dutch prescription and my Michigan medical marijuana card: “This is just smuggling drugs to us.” I’m in London to mark the release of my new album MOHAWK from Ironman Records and play a couple of little gigs with my drummer and comrade Steve The Fly, who produced the…
Free The Weed 35 – by John Sinclair
Highest greetings from Amsterdam, where people in the cannabis community are looking on in wonder as the United States takes its first tentative steps toward legalizing marijuana for use by all thinking persons over 18 years of age. Like they say in New Orleans, a lotta people don’t know that marijuana is not actually legal in the Netherlands, although over-the-counter sales of cannabis has been allowed under what they call a “grey area” in the law which amounts to a sort of super-decriminalization policy that not only eliminates arrest but lets smokers buy and ingest the sacrament in designated coffee shops without police interference. But growing, distribution, wholesale transfer and delivery…
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