2023-08-02 15:00:08
The instruction had been given a few months before the launch of this undercover operation: “Gentlemen, let your hair grow. » On D-Day, decked out in pastel shirts and fancy sunglasses, eight young Rotterdam police investigators blend in with the mass of hippies gathered on the shores of Lake Kralingse for the Holland Pop festival in 1970. “Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll” could be the unofficial program of this three-day outdoor gathering (June 26, 27 and 28, 1970). Among the headliners are T. Rex, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, The Byrds… And Pink Floyd to close it all. But it’s another star that puts the police on alert, a weed: the Cannabis sativa of its scientific name.
With 100,000 festival-goers, two-thirds of them free-riders, Holland Pop promises to be the largest meeting of smokers ever seen. Faced with the impossibility of controlling each of them, the police reached an agreement with the organizers: to make this event a large-scale experiment in the freedoms so dear to the hippies, starting with that of smoking whatever they want. In exchange, the “drug team”, made up of 70 volunteers, doctors and mediators, undertakes to guarantee everyone’s good health. The infiltrators will be there watchers, in case things get out of hand. But this is not the case: between sun and rain, everything is fine. The music is good, the campsite stays clean and there is even a nursery for the children. As for the grass, it circulates so much that it quickly runs out.
A 20-year-old, Henk de Vries, who came with friends, feels that he has a vein there. He decides to leave the party for a while to go and get supplies in Amsterdam. On the way back, he buys a stock of matchboxes, empties them to fill them with grass, and stands on a busy bridge. With the blessing of the organizers, who announce his presence over the loudspeakers, he can deal in peace, under the eyes of the undercover agents sprawled on the lawn.
Breaking taboos
When silence falls on Lake Kralingse, after the hovering finale ofInterstellar Overdrive (Pink Floyd), the bet is won. Not a fight, not an overdose, not a death to deplore on the plain. The legend even says that a child was born there. History will remember above all this controlled laissez-faire on the consumption of grass, a flexibility immediately analyzed at the top of the Dutch State. Could this be the start of a revolution? Because beyond the festival, the entire national territory is faced with an explosion in the supply and demand for drugs. This country with a long trading tradition has become a hub for the supply of narcotics of all types. The police are overwhelmed; the authorities wonder about the evolution of society.
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