The Prague Post Online: Tempo: Jiří Doležal: Still toking for change

December 2nd, 2008

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Jiří Doležal: Still toking for change

Reflex's gonzo columnist has the authorities exasperated

By Seth Fiegerman
For The Prague Post
April 18th, 2007 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST

Still crusading for legalized marijuana, "the Czech Hunter S. Thompson" denies knowing the name and believes, sort of, in Buddhism.

He peers sharply through a pair of imitation John Lennon glasses, as he produces a bag of tobacco and carefully rolls himself a cigarette. “This is actually legal,” he says.

It is surprising to see Jiří X Doležal, the Czech Republic’s leading advocate for decriminalizing marijuana, smoking anything other than his beloved cannabis. However, age and two decades of drug use are starting to catch up with his body, chipping away some of his memories. It seems unlikely to diminish his spirit.

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST

"My girlfriend and I enjoy Fuang Fen Jong underwear," a bit more than we need to know.

“I prefer to smoke marijuana every day if I can, but I’m getting too old,” he says. “Now I can only smoke at night, with the evening news on.” Doležal, who has been referred to by the Los Angeles Times as the Czech version of Hunter S. Thompson, looks almost old enough to fit the part, though he’s barely in his 40s.

Sitting in an Old Town bar, he is dressed entirely in black, and wearing a loose sweater that makes him look in danger of vanishing. All that’s visible is his balding head. But some tattoos underneath, including one of Gandalf from Lord of the Rings, and talk of his drug-induced trips through India and Africa instantly make him seem much younger.

Doležal is a full-time journalist at the Czech news weekly Reflex and a larger-than-life figure, usually accompanied by his signature Argentinean bulldog, Kačenka. The Jindřichův Hradec native has written several books in Czech on marijuana use since 1990. These include a manual on how to grow it and a complete handbook called How to Take Drugs. He also wrote a book on the Prague Zoo and has visited Africa to research one on his “toxical cycles,” the way different drugs affect him physically.

Marijuana became popular with Czechs shortly after the end of communism, and Doležal soon became popular with it. But he maintains this happened in reverse order. “Marijuana became popular here in 1990 thanks to my first book,” he says with a smile, referring to his grower’s manual.

“Marijuana has always been a token of youth rebelling against an embedded social order,” says Karel Müller, a political sociologist, explaining one possible reason for its appeal in a former communist country. The liberal and atheistic climate of the Czech Republic is also a factor. “Politicians and religious officials are not giving a strong anti-drug message to the youth,” he says, leaving only the media and the police to influence them.

Doležal, a self-professed atheist who also “may be a Buddhist,” first smoked marijuana in his early 20s, though he can’t remember the experience anymore. At the time, he was finishing his studies in psychology at Charles University, from which he went straight to Reflex, where he took up marijuana as his cause.

As he slides back into memories of his drug-induced experiences, his deep voice begins to crackle. Before long, it dissolves into uninhibited laughter. The simple thought of marijuana animates Doležal, and you cannot help but laugh with him.

By the end of the ’90s, marijuana legislation stalled in the Czech Republic.

Jiří Komorous, head of the National Anti-Drug Squad, a special police unit that fights organized drug crime, believes activists such as Doležal are leading drug legislation in the wrong direction. “He and his colleagues do as much as they are able to do for legalization of marijuana production, cultivation and distribution in their articles,” Komorous says. “This is one of the reasons why the Czech Republic is a leading country for marijuana abuse.”

“Doležal confers to everybody the so-called right of free choice,” he says. But Komorous, a man of religious faith, believes this attitude is simply wrong. Instead, he believes marijuana should not be legalized, advocating stricter laws against dealers.

Those who side with Doležal hope to see marijuana decriminalized in the next two to three years. But the police, Komorous and the Christian Democratic Party all oppose any such liberalization.

New marijuana legislation has been presented to Parliament periodically, sometimes even passing through the lower chamber only to stall in the upper chamber. “The legislation that would decriminalize the growing of marijuana has been fully written for five years,” Doležal says. “But this law lies on the desk of the department of justice, and from time to time makes its way to Parliament.”

Under communism, according to Doležal, possession of marijuana was not a serious crime. But in 1999, 10 years after the end of communism, a new law was implemented, making it illegal to carry “more than a small amount.” The Civic Democrats drafted a bill in 2001 to decriminalize marijuana and in 2003 a bill reducing punishment to a simple fine was debated. This would follow the trend of Western Europe, which tends to view marijuana use as a health issue rather than a criminal one.

Doležal says this legislation never passes because legalizing marijuana is no longer a popular issue. “Everyone is satisfied with the way things are.”

Müller, the sociologist, agrees. “While it is a contested issue, it’s not a hot issue,” he says, adding that one reason is the incredible tolerance that already exists in public spaces for smoking marijuana.

As Doležal puts it, the only enforcement is “political enforcement” — that is, anti-drug rhetoric, little more. It is a bizarre situation, but, as Doležal is quick to point out, “the Czech Republic is the country of Franz Kafka and Kafka is author of the bizarre.”

The much-read columnist relishes exposing the absurd nature of police drug enforcement with his own equally bizarre methods. In 1998, Jiří Vacek, the head of city police in Liberec, north Bohemia, proposed tough new legislation to Parliament that would make it illegal to possess any drugs. In response, Doležal infamously gave marijuana to Vacek, concealed in a statue.

“As a present, I gave him a Buddha with grass inside it. I returned a week later and the grass was still there,” he said. “I showed him how easy it is to possess marijuana.”

Doležal seems to take pleasure in making a scene. Currently, he has a parody campaign up on the Reflex Web site, in which he appears in his underwear, endorsing Chinese shorts. The fake ad is intended to defend Jan Šibík, a war photographer and colleague at the magazine, who has taken some heat for appearing in an airline ad. “It’s all for fun,” Doležal says.

When asked how he generates these ideas, his memory fails him again. But the ideas keep coming somehow, each one contributing as much to Doležal’s personal image as they do his causes.

In the meantime, marijuana use is clearly spreading among Czechs, who account for the highest percentage of users in Europe. According to a 2005 report by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, 22 percent of Czechs between 16 and 34 have smoked it at least once in the previous year.

In between cigarette puffs, Doležal reminisces about life before 1989. “There was only a small community who knew what marijuana was,” he recalls, “but they smoked openly. Police did not know what marijuana was at the time. There was no period like the ’60s here. Not like there was in America.”

Things have shaken out differently in other former Eastern bloc countries. In Poland, possession of as little as 1 gram (.04 ounce) of pot can result in arrest. Catholic Slovakia is also less liberal than the Czech Republic, as Müller points out, citing “the lack of Christian morality,” and the greater number of Czech atheists.

Some believe legalizing marijuana would also make the Czech Republic more desirable to tourists, as it did for Amsterdam. Prague “would be even better and [more] attractive to tourists like me,” says Mikki Norris, director of the Cannabis Consumers Campaign, a pro-marijuana activist group in the United States.

But one marijuana dealer at Chateau Rouge, a popular bar in Old Town, disagrees: “Tourists already flock here for cheap and easy marijuana. What difference could it make?”

Doležal says he really just wants Czechs to be able to grow a little for themselves without having to worry about police intervention. He is hardly interested in more tourists. “I can just imagine the streets of Prague filled with stoned East Germans. No, any new law would only change the situation for growers, not for tourists.”

The notorious columnist claims he has never heard the name Hunter S. Thompson. If you ask whom he considers himself most similar to, he will list a number of Czech writers and poets before settling upon a simple answer: “There are a lot of people in Prague like me. I am common.” If that unlikely assertion is true, then it’s only a matter of time until some form of his marijuana dream comes to pass.

Seth Fiegerman can be reached at tempo@praguepost.com

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