A good friend of mine set up this business meeting with a 20th Century Fox executive. There I was, armed with nothing but The Rules of Engagement, a brainchild of mine on 20th-century warfare which I was eager to sell to the world. I was certain Fox was a great match.
We were sitting in a burger joint near Abbot Kinney, the pulsing vein of hip Los Angeles. Across from me, the Fox executive was dispatching voice messages like there was no tomorrow. Without missing a beat, he fired a suggestion at my friend and I – the Kimchi burger, the must have special of the day.
Phone call terminated, he turned to me with eyes that said: ‘You’ve got five minutes.” Halfway through my fourth or fifth sentence of my well prepared pitch, I realised it wasn’t going anywhere. He mumbled something like nobody cared for war nor the Academy Award-winning The Hurt Locker and bluntly asked: “Got anything else?” “Cannabis,” I blurted out, a show on Holland’s infamous “coffeeshops” where people are allowed to buy and smoke marihuana or hashish.
Although the exec from Fox was much more interested in cannabis than war, it never came to anything. Back in Amsterdam, my phone buzzed with an unexpected call from KRO-NCRV, a Dutch public broadcaster. They hinted that the NPO, the collective might of Dutch public broadcasters, had caught wind of our project Cannabis. It was the year 2018, a time when Netflix’s Wild Wild Country had just stirred the documentary scene into a frenzy, making it the new gold rush of television. Amidst this documentary boom, Cannabis found its footing and funding at an astonishing speed.
The ambition for Cannabis was clear from the get-go: to dive deep into the storied past of cannabis in the Netherlands, yet anchor it with a narrative so compelling it would glue audiences to their screens. The plot thickened with the story of Johan van Laarhoven, a Dutch cannabis entrepreneur sentenced in 2014 to a century in a Thai prison on charges of money laundering related to his cannabis ventures. The Dutch government dismissed it as Thailand’s problem, offering no assistance, leaving Johan and his Thai wife to wither in the Bangkok prison.
Cannabis by director Arjen Sinninghe Damsté draws on many hours of archive material out of which a captivating epic is created. Interviews with key players expose the entwining influences of hippies, the American ‘War on Drugs’, the modification of the Dutch drug laws, pioneering cannabis entrepreneurs, the European unification, the reorganisation of the Public Prosecution Service and the rise of right-wing populism. Through revealing information, we learn how they have each left their mark on the renowned yet notorious Dutch trait of turning a blind eye to cannabis. In three hundred minutes of exciting and engaging television, Cannabis exposes how the fate of Johan van Laarhoven was determined nearly fifty years ago, when the Netherlands started tolerating coffeeshops, and ultimately the series shows how the Dutch chose to believe in the unfounded myth of the Netherlands as an exemplary state of law.