Word: machler
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...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...