Word: hemp
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...rule, the partyers don't pursue the new drugs; they tend to find a potion and stick with it, sometimes until it kills them. Today's popular party drugs are derived from ancient medicinal herbs: marijuana from hemp, cocaine from coca leaf, prescription painkillers from poppies. It's the shamans who aggressively seek out new substances. Recent additions to the U.S. market include ayahuasco, a plant long used in religious ceremonies in Brazil for its mind-manipulating qualities, and Salvia divinorum, a soft-leaved plant native to Mexico that is chewed or smoked for hallucinogenic effects...