Downhill all the way

The March/April issue of Skiing magazine contains a very helpful article for skiers by Jon Billman on the consumption of marijuana in Switzerland:

“I won't try to hide the fact that for a big chunk of the skiing population, sliding downhill and the chronic go together like chips and salsa or Limbaugh and OxyContin. I won't moralize, either, though I'm sick to death of the puritanical evangelical set who'd have us know what is righteous—like Crown Royal and golf. Strange hypocrisies abound, friends, in the land of the free. Your Zoloft prescription is ready now. Be sure to visit our mid-mountain cocktail bar on the way down, pour some more vodka into your Red Bull, and please be careful skiing down Blue Boulevard. We live in a drug culture, but Switzerland is different. Countrywide, Switzerland's is not a drug culture, it's a marijuana culture. The Suisse understand the difference. I learned about the no-ropes marijuana climate in Switzerland from—trust me here—two of the best skiers in the world, both of whom, if you’ve read this magazine or seen any ski film in the last five years, you would recognize.”

Billman explains that

“The preferred Suisse bud varieties are grown outdoors, of Amsterdam lineage. Some former vineyards have turned from growing grapes to growing the more lucrative leaves since the Swiss Senate, in 2001, approved legal possession and limited pot production. Mind you, approval by the Senate did not mean marijuana was above-board legal. Interpretation and enforcement of pot laws in Switzerland vary throughout the country's 26 cantons, which are Switzerland's equivalent of states. (Think 3.2 beer in Utah, legal prostitution in Pahrump County, Nevada.) Alas, in 2003 the Swiss House of Representatives tossed out government proposals to decriminalize marijuana and OUT TO LUNCH signs appeared in head shops around the country.

That didn't mean, of course, that bud was difficult to find. When it comes to enforcing existing marijuana laws, no one seems very interested. Case in point: At the Pub Mont Fort in Verbier, I once visited with a Telluride expat who funded his winters in Europe by growing the locally popular Valais Pride outdoors on his patio—it beat washing dishes or running a chairlift and left his days open for skiing.”

Vineyards dropping grapes to grow pot? Wow. Imagine if we could get the French to follow suit. Or Napa Valley.

Like John Lennon might have said: Imagine there's no wine snobs.