Basel, Switzerland
Smoking tolerance level [1= very illegal 5=virtually legal]: 4
Legislation: Growing is legal, purchasing is legal but smoking isn’t.
Law Enforcement: Although it’s still illegal to smoke dope, Basel’s city prosecutor is known to tolerate doses up to 30 grams of marijuana. Dealing, however, is verboten.
Where Buy Marijuana in Basel: Marijuana can be found all over the city – if you know where to look. The easiest place to buy though is by the Rhine in Klein Basel, in between MittleBrucke and JohaniteBruke. All along the river (especially in Summer) there are groups of Africans and Moraccans selling bud, and hashish. Quality varies wildly from group to group – most will try and sell you outdoor grown swiss weed – but if you ask for it you can usually find some great indoor grown skunk. Hashish is just as easy to find in the same places, but the quality is not normally as good as the bud.
Basel Marijuana Prices:
Typically 50chf for 3.5g of the outdoor weed, or for 2-3g of indoor.
Smaller bags are normally no problem – with prices at around 20chf for about 1g of indoor.
hashish is about the same price (50chf for an 8th) but most dealers will haggle a bit, especially if you want to buy alot.
brands:Only high potency no seeds weed is sold. You may find many brands for purchase.
Full country name: Swiss Confederation
Area: 41,290 sq km
Population: 7.31 million
Capital City: Bern (pop 130,000)
People: 74% German, 20% French, 4% Italian & 1% Romansch
Language: German, French, Italian, Raeto-Romance
Religion: 49% Roman Catholic & 48% Protestant
Government: federal republic
Head of State: President Pascal Couchepin
webehigh city’s tale:
Halcyon Haze
Many a would-be tourist traveling along Basel’s immediate outskirts has mistaken it for a drab industrial city and passed it by. Pity, because Basel possesses an ancient city center, the Marktplatz, where except for the prosperity it brings, the tourist will see no sign of the chemical industry or the chemical he once sought.
A couple of years ago, if you were to take a walking tour through the tiny twisted Gässli, you’d not only feel Basel’s Celtic roots and Roman foundations but you’d have often got a whiff of cannabis. No longer, after viewing the Münster Cathedral while drifting across the Rhine on current-drawn ferry, will you detect the tell tale scent of pot along the Unter Rheinweg. There, if you looked about, you used to glimpse, luxuriating on a balcony or perhaps sunning in a courtyard, hemp plants growing like weed they are. Clearly, Baselers used to enjoy the occasional toke but those halcyon days are gone—underground.
Where have all the flowers gone? When once cannabis could be purchased legally all over the city, now it no longer can. The 10-gram Duftsäckli (aroma bags) meant to mothproof a closet or perfume the bath have disappeared. Insomniacs and asthmatics who could buy hemp pillows to waft their way to dreamland must now revert to feathers or foam.
Gone are the thirty-odd hemp retailers (Hanflade in Basel Deutsch) along with their large, obstructive sidewalk billboards. Gone is the skateboard repair shop and retailer who once sold grass. Gone are the exclusive well-appointed rooms above a goldsmith’s atelier and a snazzy shoe store. Gone, gone, gone are the lotions, creams, oils, tea, incense, cannabis paraphernalia, incense holders, “grow-your-own” instruction books and little Ziplock® jeweller’s sacks, neatly labelled with their price and evocative names like Skunk, Pink and Honolulu Haze.
Briefly, ever so briefly, there were more hemp stores in Basel than museums but museums now take the lead again. So while tourists to Basel may no longer bathe in hemp, perfume their hotel rooms with Duftsäcklis of grass or have their fill of cannabis tea, the city offers museums galore. For a real high, the museum enthusiast might want to consider buying the three-country museum pass valid in more than a hundred museums in the Basel area of Switzerland, Germany and France.
But if museums aren’t quite what the disappointed visitor had in mind, no matter; Basel offers an alternative soft drug, available all over the city, with a guaranteed high but none of the hassle of police, border guards or dogs. It is—you guessed it—Swiss chocolate.
webehigh thinks you should know:
Although technically illegal as a drug, marijuana production (agricultural and private) and distribution in the form of stores specializing in the sale of “hemp” products are found throughout the country. The report pointed out that marijuana cultivation in Switzerland had greatly increased during the 1990s and that most of the crop was destined for the illegal market rather than the legal one (e.g. as a renewable raw material for textile production). According to an investigation in all cantons, hashish was mainly sold on the street while marijuana was being sold more and more through hemp shops as “aromatic pillows.”
Switzerland is comprised of 26 states (cantons), each with its own constitution, parliament, government and court system as provided by the Federal Constitution. Understanding Switzerland’s political structure helps to understand its drug policy. It can be argued that Switzerland has 26 different drug polices, one for each canton and half-canton.
The police view is that the vast majority of hemp fields in Switzerland are used to produce cannabis supplied to the drug trade. It can be assumed that in 1998 considerably more than 100 metric tons of drug-grade cannabis were harvested. Today Switzerland has an almost nationwide network of 135 hemp shops. The big increase started in 1996 and led to the creation of major centers in the city and canton of Zurich (a total of 36), in the canton of St. Gallen (18), in Ticino (16) in Basel (7) and in the canton of Berne (6). Police information shows that between 85 and 95 percent of sales in most hemp shops come from drug products (“hemp pillows”, “aromatic bags”, “refills for aromatic bags”, “hemp coins” etc.) The THC content of cannabis sold in “aromatic bags” is frequently between 8 and 10 percent, for example.