Invariably one of the first things people ask me when I tell them I'm from the Netherlands is if I smoke. I tell them I smoke cigars, but that wasn't what they were interested in. They wanted to know if I smoked marijuana or hashish.
Well, I did. But not very often, and ever after I was kicked out of art school I smoked maybe 2 joints (and that was in the strict sense of the word, with others) a year. And I didn't inhale. Okay that's a lie, but when I inhaled I started to cough loudly, and that never went away, not even when I blowed (that's the term used in the Netherlands for smoking softdrugs) regularly at art school. It always made people laugh, but I hated it since it prevented me from keeping the smoke in and getting high. Maybe I should have built a water pipe but that was just too much of a hassle.
So no, I'm not a pothead exactly. And I don't know many people in the Netherlands that are, even though you can buy the stuff at almost every corner "coffee shop".
To give an example, this joint we recived from Alison's brother (the other brother, not the one that has pot-induced schizophrenia) as a Christmas gift, has still not been smoked, a year-and-a-halve later.
I figured I'm still not yet assimilated to Canada, when I read the following:
Marijuana use in Canada is the highest in the industrialized world, far higher than in the Netherlands where it's legal, and more than four times the global rate, a report by the United Nations has found.
So it's about time we smoke that joint.