A Czech Toke on Freedom

PRAGUE, Czech Republic — The man with the dancing eyebrows and the blurry tattoo stands in the chilled night and opens the barred gate to his apartment. A dog sleeps on the bed; a snapping turtle floats inside a glass coffee table. A fan hums and a hot light glows in the bathroom, where 11 marijuana plants ripple like a tiny field against the porcelain.

Sit, says J.X. Dolezal, a kind of Czech version of the late Hunter S. Thompson who has written the books "How to Take Drugs" and "Stoned County." He opens a box. There's a sprinkle across paper, a nimble roll of the fingers, a lick, a match strike, a curl of smoke -- and a smile.

"Do you mind?" says Dolezal, his face slightly obscured as he exhales. "Excuse me if I don't offer you any. This marijuana's often too strong for my visitors. I had to resuscitate one guy for almost an hour once. You know, a higher percentage of people here grow their own marijuana than probably anywhere. It's typically Czech: a do-it-yourself nation."

The Czechs do like their weed. A 2005 report by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction found that 22% of Czechs between 16 and 34 had smoked marijuana at least once during the previous year, the highest percentage in the European Union. The nation's cannabis culture is imbued with the whimsical ethos of the hippie movement: guys growing dope in fields, on balconies and in bathrooms, and sharing with friends.

"I've never paid for pot and I never would," said Filip Hubacek, a university student majoring in social sciences. "I don't mind paying for my gym, but not for my pot."

Selling or offering marijuana is illegal here, but the law is permeable, containing a passage that could have been lifted from a novel by Franz Kafka, the Prague-born chronicler of the absurd. It's OK to possess "no amount larger than a small amount," according to the statute. The metric rationalizations and extrapolations around such an ambiguous definition are debated with gleeful fervor amid smoke wisps in clubs and in apartments like Dolezal's.

"We have to be concerned with the use of marijuana," said Viktor Mravcik, director of a national agency that studies drug use and addiction. "It's becoming a political problem. It's not something we are proud of. One of our targets is to stop [the use of] marijuana and Ecstasy in the young population."