Should I take something to smoke on vacation?

The crackdown on smoking pot is getting tougher and tougher. Especially at the borders, leniency is hardly to be expected. The police there are especially sharp. Even after Switzerland has joined the Schengen area and there are actually no more controls at our borders, there is of course still repression.

The controls have been moved from the borders to the area near the borders. And that means that IC trains from the south can be checked as far as Thun or from Basel to Zurich. And the same applies on the roads.

In addition, smoking pot is not tolerated in the surrounding countries. For example, someone who drove to Germany with thirty grams of weed and was caught by the Federal Border Guard there received a fine of 3,000 euros - a horrendous amount for a fairly harmless substance. (Continues below.)

In addition, you will then be listed in the Schengen search system as a narcotics smuggler and can thus get massive problems if your passport is checked somewhere in Europe. This can be quite troublesome for the future. Therefore, it is really recommended not to bring illegal hemp products across borders. In the USA, for example, being caught once can already be punished with entry bans of several years.

There are even areas, such as the Arab Emirates, where you can get in big trouble even though you don't have any hash or weed on you. We had a case where someone came into contact with the police and was detained for days simply because of a positive urine test, and was only able to leave the country again with the help of a lawyer (and costs of over 10,000 francs).

Vacations in Switzerland can also end expensively: For example, snowboarders in various resorts are targeted for frisking at weed - every winter we get to hear such cases from the Valais and Graubünden.

There are only a few areas where smoking pot hardly causes any problems. For example, in Holland, especially in Amsterdam. But only as long as you don't carry more than five grams on you and smoke pot in the coffee shops. Because you can get into trouble with the police if the hotel security makes a complaint or if you consume outside. Even in more rural Dutch areas, the much-vaunted Dutch tolerance is not very great. Currently (summer 2011), efforts are underway to supervise coffee shops more strictly and perhaps only allow them to be open to people living in Holland.

And even if somewhere in Thailand practically everyone smokes pot and even the village policeman earns his money by selling weed, the national police or army can still organize a huge raid. And then you get to know the whole abomination of detention abroad: Not knowing the language, not knowing the laws, being sold by the lawyers - such stories can end very badly.

It is not so easy to combine a relaxing vacation with smoking. How the situation will develop in the Czech Republic (where some plants were decriminalized at the beginning of 2010) or in California and generally in the USA, where a lot is happening in the field of medical marijuana - we will see.