Newsgroups: alt.drugs
From: [d g ross] at [polyslo.csc.calpoly.edu] (Dave Gross)
Subject: My Short, Happy Career as an International Narcotics Trafficker
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 94 02:58:12 GMT

	My short, happy career as an international narcotics trafficker

If you're in Amsterdam, and you're with a friend who doesn't get stoned, dig
prostitutes, or get a kick out of canals, you swing by the Anne Frank house
and you go to the Van Gogh museum and see more Van Goghs per square meter
than you ever thought possible.  There's the one on your calendar at home,
see!  Right there on the wall.  And no guardrail or badge or Vanna White, no
button on the wall to push to get a deep voice telling you the importance of
it all.

Irises, self-portraits, cypresses, sunflowers, the whole nine yards.  Godawful
gorgeous, especially when you're stoned.

If you're in Amsterdam, and you're with a friend who doesn't get stoned, get
stoned a lot, `cause you'll be leaving soon.  Thank goodness your friend is
there or you might never leave.  A coffeehouse on every block it seems, each
with its own aesthetic (and menu).  Spacecakes.  I wonder what they put in
spacecakes.  And I've never been in a real leather gay bar where they really
wear those funny leather hats.  And the head shops, and the hash museum, and
the sex museum, and the torture museum.  Oh my.

If you're in Amsterdam, and you're with a friend who doesn't get stoned, get
a doggie bag.  But if you're Eurailing around through a dozen border checks,
you don't want to be carrying.  Pot may be one of the more innocent illegal
drugs, but it's also one of the stinkiest.

So I buy a little baggie of hash.  The baggies have a green pot-leaf printed
on them.  How cool.  I wonder who makes them, like I wonder who manufactures
the perforated and trademarked blotter paper used in the distribution of LSD.
There's a menu, and I choose Afghanistan as my exporter.  They're still
fighting off the Ruskies at this stage of the game, and I feel like giving
`em a little boost.

I idly think of finding something to ship it in.  Maybe a wooden shoe gift
shop trinket.  But wait...  I bet any package coming out of the Netherlands
and destined for a California address is given a thorough going-over.  I'll
have to wait.

So on to Brussels, where the naive world travellers are baffled by images of
a urinating little boy everywhere in the city.  Statues, post cards, even
corkscrews for God's sake.  Some legend.  Little boy puts out a fire, saves
the city.  Something like that.

No dice; we're in and out of Belgium in no time.  It strikes us as the New
Jersey of the continent.  Where to?  Switzerland.  Somewhere.  I forget.  It
wasn't until Germany that I finally got desperate and said goddammit, I'm
getting rid of this stash now, language barrier or no language barrier.  I'm
carrying the baggie in a front pocket of my vest, and it's weighing on my
idea of a good time.  That is, the idea of a night in a German jail with
drunken soccer hooligans and neo-nazis, trying to find a lawyer who speaks
English in a country whose civil rights guarantees I know only from legend
is weighing on my idea of a good time.

We burst out of the train and I go first to a gift shop, where I buy a very
small mailing tube made out of some substance that is impossible to stick
stamps to or write on, and which contains a plastic and nylon rose and is
covered in red hearts.  I then buy some tape so I can tape an address label
to the tube.  Then I go on a fruitless quest for a post office.

Finally, frustrated yet determined, I decide to find an information booth
and ask there.  I dash across the train station to a booth in the middle and
hope that either of the uniformed officers there knows English.

Actually, one of them does, a little.  We're able to communicate fairly well,
except that his German shepherd keeps barking at me.  So I'm trying to ask
the officer where I can find a post office.  He's trying to understand me,
give me directions, and shut his dog up.  The other officer is just kicking
back, reading a magazine, and giving us little notice.

Finally, after a lot of pointing and sign language, I'm fairly confident I
can find the building in question.  I walk confidently back to my friend, who
hears me out and then looks me straight in the eye, "I wonder why that German
shepherd was barking at you."

Oh.

Heh.

We did find the post office, but the mailing tube (which I'd finally stuffed
with the booty) wasn't regulation size.  The helpful friendly lady told me I
needed an envelope.  I asked her if I could buy one at her recommendation.
"We don't sell envelopes; this is a POST OFFICE."

Oh.

Heh.

So across the street to where I bought the mailing tube, to buy an envelope
to put the mailing tube in.  Then across to the post office to send it on its
way.  You'll be happy to note that it arrived intact at a friend's pad, and
was even mostly intact when I returned.

The punch line is that when we left the city later that afternoon en route to
somewhere else, two officers (might have been the same ones, I dunno) swept
through our car, woke me up and searched my vest.  None of the other passengers
in the car got that treatment.  My vest was one of those yuppie photographer's
vests with a zillion pockets, so it took the both of them what seemed like
forever to go through it all.  At one point they find an empty film cannister.
"Aha!" announces one (here, I'm translating from the German).  But alas, it
really /is/ empty.  They hand me back my vest and continue on their way.
-- 
***** INTERNET: [d g ross] at [polyslo.CalPoly.EDU] **** finger for PGP public key *****
"She said much of the peer pressure among students is emphasized by the media
 and society, which perpetuates the myth of women wanting sex."
		-- from an article on date rape in the Mustang Daily