Going Up in Smoke

For most Europeans, Switzerland is a conservative place of bank secrecy, chocolates and luxury watches. Now another product, cannabis, is on its way to becoming as quintessentially Swiss as the multifunction penknife. Berhard Machler is one man who appreciates the new trend in diversification. Machler is a manager and founding member of the Enetbrugg cooperative, a business north of Zurich that employs 200 people and racked up revenues of $5.5 million in 1999 by growing pot and selling it to the country's burgeoning network of legal hemp shops. The cooperative's revenues were lower last year, in part because the risks of the enterprise were underlined by cops.

In late September police helicopters swooped down on Enetbrugg fields to seize 70,000 top-grade marijuana plants. (Marijuana is a variety of hemp plant in which levels of the hallucinogen tetrahydrocannabinol--THC--are high enough to give smokers a buzz.) Machler spent 16 days in jail, along with the five other Enetbrugg founders, and puts the group's loss from the episode at $1.7 million. Yet, he says, "I don't blame the police. They're just doing their job."

The bust--and Machler's reaction to it--highlights the legal ambiguity of Switzerland's cannabis economy. Technically, growing or selling the plant is legal unless it's to be used as a hallucinogen. Proving that seized marijuana was intended for that purpose is a job for the police and the courts. "If you said you were selling it to treat epilepsy, the police would have to follow buyers home to see what they did with it," says Thomas Zeltner, head of the Federal Office of Public Health.

The marijuana business has, well, mushroomed as a result. Twenty hemp shops were in business across Switzerland in 1997, selling marijuana as "smell bags" and "dried flowers." Today there are as many as 300. Official figures show 600 acres of fields producing marijuana for some 600,000 occasional-to-regular consumers. "A lot of shops are making a lot of money because the margins are very high," says Francois Reusser, president of the Swiss Hemp Coordination, who also runs the Zurich hemp shop Chanf.

Reusser's store has an airy, modern feel. Its shelves and other display spaces are crammed with a bewildering array of hemp by-products. But most customers make straight for the counter and its white plastic drawer of cellophane-wrapped marijuana. "Hemp shops are basically places that sell grass," says Reusser. "The rest has been a good way of camouflaging an illegal activity. I like all the other stuff, but it doesn't make a lot of money."

Reusser insists his primary goal is not so much making money as changing the law. He may be about to get what he wants. The federal government announced plans this autumn to decriminalize personal possession and consumption of cannabis. Sometime this spring it will unveil proposals to regulate shops and growers, a move that could involve Dutch-style tolerance, subject to a few conditions: sales restricted to certain outlets and forbidden to minors or foreigners. After parliamentary debate, a new law could take effect in 2002. "We certainly don't want to become a country which exports cannabis," says Zeltner, "and the Swiss government will not take the step of legalizing the substance." But well-dressed men are already rolling joints in Swiss train carriages without fellow passengers' batting an eyelid. In practice, the distinction between the limited depenalization proposed by Swiss authorities and outright legalization is a fine one.