The U.S. has less than 5% of the world’s population, yet we have a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Since the declaration of the “War on Drugs” in the 1970s, the U.S. prison population has more than quadrupled. More than 1.5 million Americans are now arrested each year for nonviolent drug offenses, and more than 500,000 of them are imprisoned.

To date, the War on Drugs has killed more than 30,000 Mexicans, made our borders less safe, ruined the lives of millions of American families, wasted hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money, and created the world’s largest prison population. The marijuana prohibition alone costs (by one estimate) more than $40 billion per year—yet it hasn’t achieved its stated goals of reducing marijuana use. Instead, it has created a black market that has turned the pot trade into a lucrative, tax-free industry dominated by organized crime (especially in Mexico, where half the trade is in marijuana) and plagued by the dangers of impure, unregulated drugs. And it stuffs our crowded, enormously expensive prisons with nonviolent pot offenders that don’t belong there.

Since 1990, the U.S. has arrested and prosecuted more than 10 million people, disproportionately African-American, for smoking pot in private—something that brings happiness to many that use it, and causes no harm to those that do not. Yes, it is possible to smoke too much pot, and there can be adverse health consequences of doing so. But those consequences are less than what can result from using too much alcohol, tobacco, junk food, or many over-the-counter medications. Smoking pot is a personal choice that more than four in 10 Americans have made, including the past three presidents, and while it may be a public health issue of interest, it is not a crime against society or against another citizen.

Throwing nonviolent drug offenders in prison puts them in a place where they often can’t easily get treatment for addiction. It crowds out many murderers, rapists, and thieves who do deserve to be there. It numbs society to the seriousness of violence by implying that drug use is just as bad. It undermines imprisonment’s effectiveness as a deterrent to violent crime by cheapening the punishment, turning it into something commonplace. And it blurs the distinctions between moral innocence and moral culpability.

The effects of imprisonment on individuals are far-reaching. Taking people out of society and the workforce ruins not just their own lives, but also the lives of the people that care for them, the people for whom they care, the people whose livelihoods depend on their own. When we use the state’s power of violence to break apart families, to separate husbands from wives, sons from daughters, lovers from lovers, friends from friends, when we replace nature’s most fundamental bonds with gun towers and concrete, we create wounds that take far longer to heal than the inmates’ sentences. The state that uses its power of violence to wound citizens that do not wound others, the state that takes children from their parents when neither poses a threat to the other or to society, has breached its social contract with those that have honored it. The state that harms the harmless is a failed state.

Prop 19 is not a perfect law, and it doesn’t have to be. If it passes, it will quickly change and evolve. What really matters is the message that passing Prop 19 will send: that we need to have a new conversation about drug policy in America. Passing Prop 19 will send our lawmakers, the Obama administration, and the rest of the world the message that American taxpayers are sick of paying tens of billions of dollars every year to throw nonviolent pot smokers in prison, sick of subsidizing criminal gangs by rewarding their activities with a black-market premium, and sick of treating drug addicts—the sick, the tired, the poor, huddled masses, the people who need society’s help most—with violence instead of compassion. It will tell them that we demand an end to the failed War on Drugs, an end to the murders in Mexico, an end to the most expensive waste of law enforcement resources in human history, and a new approach to drug policy and in America and the rest of the world.

Here’s the news from today, according to the New York Times: 1,200 members of the National Guard have been sent to the border to “combat drug smuggling.” More drug-related violence can only be dealt with through greater enforcement, goes the Bush-McCain-and-now-Obama story. We’ve got to fight the war on drugs; to fight the drug criminals; to save the people from violence.

There’s just one flaw in this story: it’s got the causality going in the wrong direction. US drug policy is the cause of the current epidemic of violence and lawlessness in northern Mexico and along the border, not the cure for it. The more resources we devote to enforcing our drug prohibition, the higher we drive prices, the bigger the incentives to smuggle drugs, the bigger the spoils for the gangs of lawless criminals to whom we redirect the unimaginable profits of several massive, centuries-old industries, and the more these gangs will be willing to fight to the death over pieces of that enormous black-market pie.

By legislating common drugs out of the legal marketplace, we are creating a black market out of thin air. It is not hyperbole to suggest that US law is not just providing a subsidy of billions to the Sinaloa cartel—our laws have actually legislated the cartel, and its rivals, into existence.

Who stands to lose the most if we legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana and cocaine, and open these industries to legitimate companies? The Sinaloa cartel. We devote $11 billion of military and law enforcement resources to eliminating their competition and maintaining their monopoly power—and thus their staggering profits. They are probably the foremost advocates of the current US drug policy. Their worst nightmare would be for the marijuana industry to turn into something like tobacco: low-margin, heavily regulated, taxed, nonviolent, unglamorous, highly competitive, unable to command a risk premium. When was the last time you heard about a tobacco gang shooting?

The effects of US drug policy have never been felt more tragically in northern Mexico, where turf wars between rival drug cartels are fought. Ciudad Juárez, where the murder of innocent civilians is as commonplace as a fender-bender, is now confronting the very real prospect of a lost generation of youth—a generation so scared to walk the streets of its own city that it grows up as if in a coma, with fear the only coherent thread of civic life. In Juárez, beheadings are barely newsworthy. Is it any wonder that some of the civilians caught in this warfare would risk their lives to cross the border into the US?

A rational humanitarian policy would contemplate welcoming residents of Ciudad Juárez into the United States as war refugees. Why don’t we do this? Maybe it’s because admitting there’s a war in Mexico might mean confronting the horrifying truth that this war is ours, our failed war on drugs, and the citizens of Juárez, these would-be refugees, are our collateral damage. Washington now seems comfortable with the idea that we own the violence in Baghdad, yet the idea that we own the violence in Juárez is still Washington taboo. We don’t even believe we’re involved.

As Tax Cannabis 2010—a November 2010 referendum to legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana—gains steam in California and has a slim lead in public opinion polls, with vast bipartisan support amongst academics (especially social scientists) and medical doctors, it becomes more and more bizarre that the Obama administration, far from being merely mum on the topic, has come out strongly and repeatedly in favor of the current US drug policy. Even most right-wing commentators acknowledge that our drug policy disproportionately affects minorities, imprisoning and disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of minority citizens for private behavior with public health/safety risks that, in the case of marijuana (according to the American Medical Association), are vastly less than those of high-fructose corn syrup.

Let us, as Obama might say, be perfectly clear: our supposedly pro-minority, pro-human-rights, pro-diplomacy president holds the unambiguous position that the importance of preventing Americans from smoking herb dwarfs any concerns about the uncontained numbers of murders, Mexican cities on the brink of civil war, a lost generation in northern Mexico. The administration’s decision not to go after the medical marijuana dispensaries in California now seems like a sleazy handout to his Hollywood hippie base. It is clear that enforcing the marijuana prohibition is of paramount political importance to the administration, and that the DOJ and military intend to be swift and merciless with such enforcement anywhere near our national borders.

Can we use taxpayer money to create and maintain an unprecedented network of interior border checkpoints whose dogs sniff every single person driving along the interstate highways between Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas? Yes, we can. Can we shift the focus of our military forces and allocate thousands of troops from our national guard to hunt down people who want to transport bud across the Sonora desert? Yes, we can. Can we utilize our scarce prison beds and resources to imprison and disenfranchise 600,000 nonviolent Americans for passing joints around their living rooms, even as we furlough and parole murderers and rapists because we don’t have enough room for them? Yes, we can.

Protesting Arizona’s anti-immigrant laws has become fashionable in recent weeks, and it’s been nice to see some normally staid American authority figures (like mayors and police officers) stand up for the rights of Mexicans (and people who look Hispanic) in the US. Now how about an open conversation about the fact that the US drug prohibition has created a violent black market out of thin air and, in the process, brought upon northern Mexico such a scourge of violence that millions of innocent Mexican civilians have lost the basic opportunity to lead safe, civilized lives?

As of today, Obama is no longer a mere heir of the broken US drug policy. He isn’t just carrying on the torch of keeping hundreds of thousands of nonviolent pot smokers in jail for victimless crimes. He’s now doubling down in the war on drugs. He’s increasing the subsidies for the Sinaloa cartel. He’s raising their prices and profits—and incentives to fight over more and more turf—to unprecedented levels.

This is Barack Obama’s war now: the blood of Juárez is on his hands.

Blaming a classifieds web site for the actions of an alleged murderer is almost as absurd as blaming high-school pot smokers for September 11. Nonetheless, Craigslist has decided to remove (or at least rename) the “erotic services” category of the site. This from the New York Times:

“Andrew M. Cuomo, New York’s attorney general, said his office had recently notified Craigslist about an impending prostitution case that involved the erotic services category.

‘Rather than work with this office to prevent further abuses, in the middle of the night, Craigslist took unilateral action which we suspect will prove to be half-baked,’ Mr. Cuomo said in a statement.”

Putting aside the obvious hypocrisy of this particular office’s crackdown on this particular brand of consensual human behavior—and putting aside the disturbing implication that our state’s top law enforcement officer does not subscribe to the principle of innocent until proven guilty—just why is prostitution illegal, anyway?

Prostitution will always be a profession, and it may always be a profession more risky than most. But in justifying the current policy, most prostitution prohibitionists make the same type of correlation-causation mistake that the drug prohibitionists make: they assume that the ills that sometimes surround the culture of prostitution—the pimps, the STDs, the robberies, the poor working conditions, and so on—stem naturally from the activity itself.

Yet there is better evidence that the organized crime, violence, and exploitative labor structures are drawn to the industry precisely because it is illegal—and thus outside the bounds of employment law, taxation, legal remedies for fraud, and other forms of regulation.

It’s the same fundamental correlation-causation mistake that’s made again and again by the White House Office of Drug Control Policy and other War on Drugs apologists: the failure to recognize that criminal behavior often arises from black markets just because they’re black markets, not because of what’s being bought, sold, or consumed.

Even the prohibitionist op-ed contributors to the New York Times, in a piece responding to the Eliot Spitzer controversy, can’t avoid making this basic mistake:

“Whose theory is it that prostitution is victimless?…The Emperor’s Club presented itself as an elite escort service. But aside from charging more, it worked like any other prostitution business. The pimps took their 50 percent cut. The Emperor’s Club often required that the women provide sex twice an hour. One woman who was wiretapped indicated that she couldn’t handle that pressure…The transport of women for prostitution was masked by its description as ‘travel dates.’”

Do these authors really think that these working conditions would still be acceptable at brothels if the businesses were regulated under US labor law?

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that the legalization, taxation, and regulation of prostitution—as has been done in Canada and Britain, among many other countries—would change the fact that when sex is sold, the transaction is usually of a certain sadness. In regimes where prostitution is legal and conditions are thus better for women—protection is enforced, wages and benefits guaranteed, and so on—the sadder party would often seem to be the man: he’s just paid hundreds of dollars for a woman to pretend she likes him for an hour.

On the other hand, anyone who assumes that the relationship between prostitute and client is never one of cordiality and good humor probably hasn’t spent much time talking to prostitutes or clients.

The anthropologist Patty Kelly has done so; she spent a year living in a Mexican brothel and studying the industry, and reports in an LA Times Op-Ed (written in the wake of the Spitzer revelation) that, in one of law enforcement’s more spectacular wastes of resources, more than 80,000 people per year are arrested for prostitution-related offenses. Ms. Kelly suggests an alternative solution:

“New Zealand’s 2003 Prostitution Reform Act is perhaps the most progressive response to the complex issue of prostitution. The act not only decriminalizes the practice but seeks to ‘safeguard the human rights of sex workers and protects them from exploitation, promotes the welfare and occupational health and safety of sex workers, is conducive to public health, [and] prohibits the use in prostitution of persons under 18 years of age.’ Furthermore, clients, sex workers and brothel owners bear equal responsibility for minimizing the risks of STD transmission. In 2005, a client was convicted of violating the act by slipping his condom off during sex.”

Imagine that.

So why isn’t US policy informed by the lessons of Prohibition?

One theory is that while lawmakers do sometimes seem to learn from our country’s mistakes, actually drawing analogies from those mistakes is a more elusive feat—as it is for law enforcement agencies, whose extraordinary leeway in choosing what and what not to pursue gives them a power to shape de facto law more than most citizens recognize.

That is, Mr. Cuomo is actively choosing to spend his time this way.

But there’s another, more intellectually plausible, explanation for why this is allowed to go on. I still remember, from law school, the famous “dwarf-tossing” debate that stood for the question of whether any consensual behavior between adults should ever be criminal. Those who believe it should tend to rely on the position that the criminal law, beyond merely creating a system of incentives, can also have a so-called “expressive” nature—society’s expression of a norm (in this case a behavior—the sale of sex—of which it disapproves) by codifying that norm in the criminal law.

But even if expressive laws are sometimes justified, they should not be imposed in cases that would result in obviously harmful human outcomes like the spread of STDs, violent robberies, the exploitation of women, or the vast waste of Mr. Cuomo’s resources on the victims of these crimes instead of their perpetrators.

The US prohibition on prostitution is no more justifiable than—and, in fact, strikingly similar to—the Catholic church’s prohibition on the use of condoms. When lawmakers, whatever their honest “expressive” intentions, maintain a public policy that is acknowledged to bring about disease and violence, they are willfully putting their own constituents in harm’s way.

The relationship between tourists and the places that they like to go has been ambivalent since tourism—travel as entertainment—became a real global industry in the early 1900s. Sometimes cities become caricatures of themselves, molded into their own exaggerated and inauthentic images abroad. Other times, they just become ugly high-rise beach resorts or overcrowded, overpriced wastelands.

But then there are some places where something completely different happens—where the intersection of tourists and locals has spun off, across the years, into something newer and stranger than could ever have been contemplated by either party to begin with.

To say that Amsterdam, where pot, mushrooms, and hallucinogenic substances of all sorts are legal, is only about the drugs would be to adopt a narrow perspective on the city. But Amsterdam is about the drugs, and one of the funniest things about the middle-aged American tourists that visit Amsterdam in droves, most for the first time, many with their children, 

is that a lot of them seem to have had absolutely no clue what they were getting into.

They weren’t exactly lied to, these unsuspecting families. They were truthfully told—by the tourist board or the travel guide, perhaps—about the inescapable romance of the canals. And these canals, like the ones in Venice and Bruges, really are that romantic. In Amsterdam—unlike in Venice—you can get everywhere in a car or on a bike, and the bridges are so low, there’s little in the way of actual transport along the waterways, aside from the occasional floating dining room full of tourists. These boats, which can actually fit under the bridges, are like little pieces of a cruise ship that has just been flattened by the accidental foot of a giant.

The problem might really be that the middle-aged families spent too much time reading the travel guides. Amsterdam’s “stunning juxtaposition of old and new,” waxes Time Out Amsterdam—perhaps in an attempt to fit as many guidebook clichés into one sentence as possible—“still has to be seen to be believed.”

The travel writers rave on about Anne Frank, Van Dyck, Van Gogh, bicycles, tulips, windmills, wooden shoes; about how it’s so different but so European, the consummate stop along the Grand Tour; about the lovely (but not unsafe) lean of the old merchants’ houses on the Prinsengracht and the Herengracht; about the friendliness of the Dutch populace and the “impossibly welcoming corner cafés.”

It is that same publication, Time Out, that includes the most prominent guide to the coffeeshops—the places in Amsterdam where marijuana is sold legally—that is available on the mainstream commercial market. The section covers only four of the book’s more than 300 pages, but it is still an uncommon dose of realism among the major chains of travel guides, praising certain coffeeshops for their “wide range of imported grass,” or their “top-quality 80% organically grown weed.”

Perhaps purposefully or perhaps not, that section of Time Out Amsterdam is buried after Bars, before Shops and Services, and between pages 147 and 153 of a 316-page book. There is also a five-page essay entitled “Sex and Drugs” at the end of the “In context” section, after “History,” “Amsterdam Today,” “Art,” and “Architecture.” But we former travel writers know that this is the section of a travel guide that nobody ever reads.

Certainly my friend’s mother, a high-level executive at a multinational company, didn’t have time to read it. She, probably one of the most cosmopolitan 50-something women in the world, was shocked when she walked into a “coffeeshop,” asked for the menu, and was handed a list of ten kinds of marijuana with prices by the gram. How could it possibly be that nobody had ever told her?

Well, one of the interesting aspect of the decriminalization of marijuana and mushrooms in Amsterdam is that it happened in the late 1970s, after the hippie generation had pretty much grown up. So even if the executive wasn’t a reformed hippie, a lot of the reformed hippies themselves have no idea what they’re missing. A lot of them probably wouldn’t care anymore anyway, at least any more than intellectually.

Still, how could the drug culture of Amsterdam could be such a taboo subject among the media outlets that cover the city as if it is just another beautiful European capital? Travel writers, as a lot, are fairly observant—but who is writing these books?

As you navigate the city’s bewildering network of twisting, dead-end streets and gently bending canals, one of the first things that strikes you is how many of the offerings seem meant to be experienced—only meant to be experienced—under the influence of marijuana or mushrooms. There is a store that sells only holograms. There is a café with stalactites and stalagmites. There are restaurants with life-sized dolphins made from plaster, restaurants where you eat in the dark, restaurants where you eat on a La-Z-Boy, and what must be more than a thousand purveyors of Belgian fries with mayonnaise (the first time you try them stoned, you realize that even if the fries are for everybody, they’re most especially for the stoners). It is like an open network of sensory pleasures and communicative understandings built into the rest of the city that suddenly illuminates before your eyes at the moment that you get high.

Out of respect for my colleagues, I don’t want to believe that the travel writers haven’t actually visited the city. So my only explanation is that many of the writers have never actually tried the drugs, and thus don’t understand how deeply the drugs filter through the culture and how incomplete an account of Amsterdam really is that doesn’t talk a lot about them. (It never ceases to amaze me how much more often people who have never tried drugs like to talk about drugs than people who have tried drugs.)

In any case, this lack of information leads to a lot of strange moments of contact between culture and subculture, like the executive in the coffeeshop looking for a cup of coffee, or the lost British couple with the young child wandering into an alley of the red light district and getting directions to Amsterdam’s most famous tourist attraction from a heroin dealer to whom they’re later compelled to give an involuntarily large tip.

They’ll get there in the end. Like the fairytale castles of Bavaria, the Anne Frank House is one of the few educational tourist attractions in Europe that holds the interest of children. Her story is their story; it speaks to them. But it is one of the few places in the city where the two cultures of tourism—the chaste and the profane—do not collide. Maybe there is something decadent and disturbing about visiting a monument to the Holocaust under the influence of a mind-altering substance.

There must be something right about that. Or, at least, I feel it too, even if it’s just an American cultural norm—the idea that the choice to smoke pot is a selfish one, or the idea that pot cannot be used to enhance other things in our lives, especially not emotional and serious ones—sex, for instance, or mourning. Even the college kids seem to sober up to pay their respects to Anne Frank.

It is quite a different story at the Van Gogh museum, a space that carefully straddles the intersection of the two cultures—conventional and altered states of mind. For Van Gogh, of all people, to have come from Amsterdam is almost too perfect to be true. The fight between conventional and altered states of mind is something that the painter himself frequently confronted—first with absinthe, and later with depression and epilepsy.

Could the form that these paintings’ immortalization takes possibly be any more appropriate to the artist? In front of “Wheat Field with Crows,” you might see a stuffy German couple with a deep knowledge of post-Impressionist history next to two American college girls that are truly, madly, and deeply high for the first time in their lives. And all four of them, each extracting his or her own experiences of color and categories of meaning, can barely handle how fucking good the painting is.

Those are the castles of Bavaria for a young adult. There is education the emotional way, the reason for the Van Gogh poster on the dorm room wall. But these kids’ experience in Amsterdam is also inescapably about America. Because one of the most curious, if understandable, aspects of the drug culture in the city is the extent to which if it’s legal at home, it’s not worth trying.

There is one store in the old city center that sells probably five hundred kinds of psychoactive and physiologically active substances—from a package of dried and shredded wormwood, the active ingredient in absinthe, to a potted San Pedro cactus, which makes you trip for eighteen hours and grows only in the area around Vilcabamba, Ecuador’s Valley of Eternal Youth. What is the question that the clerks hear most at this store? “How safe is this?” “Are you sure I won’t flip out?” “How much does this cost?”

No: “Is this legal in the USA?”

If it is, they’re not interested. You hear it more often from the Americans, and the younger they are, the more you hear it: There might be nothing that damns the approach taken by Reagan’s War on Drugs and its progeny more visually, more empirically, than to watch a steady parade of America’s youth combing this little store for something—anything—that they’re not allowed to eat at home. And that too is part of what Amsterdam is about. Their drug subculture is very much about us.

The Dutch really went out on a limb when they made this courageous choice in the late 1970s. However you feel about it, you have to admit that legalization was pretty ballsy. So what did they do to deserve the US drug tourists? Us? And now that they have us, what can they do with us? The problem for all the visiting pot smokers—American or otherwise—who arrive hoping to have some cultural contact with a city that is indisputably an object lesson in tolerance is that in Amsterdam, unlike in other Dutch cities, they, the visitors, make up most of the customers in most of the coffeeshops.

That is no trivial matter. Because if you came to Amsterdam to smoke pot, you immediately realize that for the Dutch people it’s just something else to do, like drinking wine with dinner, not some holy grail of open-mindedness. In the US, you feel like one of the cool kids for smoking pot. In Amsterdam, you’re one of the losers, at least in the eyes of the locals (and for me, at least, those are the eyes that matter when you travel, however condescending they might be). It’s hard, thus, once you’re in Amsterdam, to distance yourself from your fellow smokers or to think of yourself as anything other than a drug tourist. And so you accept your place in the city’s moral hierarchy.

That said, there’s a lot more sketchy shit going on in the city than whatever’s happening in the coffeeshops, and the locals’ reaction is eminently understandable when you look at what else the pot and mushrooms attract like magnets. But when people point to Amsterdam and say, look at all the druggies on the street, this is what would happen if we legalized pot, what they’re missing is that this is only what would happen if we legalized pot in just one country. The casual pot smokers might or might not come for the pot, but the people were really into pot would flock there from all over the world to the best city in that country, and they would create such a strong subculture there that it would come to envelop much of the city’s social life. And that’s what happened.

The locals, and the critics, are right that Amsterdam is now full of drug addicts. And they’re basically right that nobody wants to live in a city full of drug addicts. The pot smokers certainly don’t want to live in a city of drug addicts; most pot smokers are not drug addicts, and what a buzz kill it is to have your ephemeral mental state ruined by an angry guy shooting up in an alley. Not even the drug addicts probably want to live in a city full of drug addicts. But there are certainly a lot of true drug addicts among the people who think it’s worth traveling all the way to Amsterdam where strong hydroponic weed and peyote and mushrooms are sold legally and cheaply, over the counter.

And so among the people in Amsterdam who abuse drugs, very few of them are Dutch. You can say this is a failure for the city itself, but you can also say that the Dutch experiment is a success: Dutch levels of hard drug abuse and addiction are low by international standards. And if you’re constructing a behavioral economics argument about whether or not drugs should be legal in other places, that’s the only thing that should matter, because if everyone legalized pot and mushrooms, the drug tourists wouldn’t have to come to Amsterdam anymore, and it would become a lot more like the city the locals want it to be. We owe it to Amsterdam to be courageous too.

In the meantime, though, it’s a curiosity, and I love a good curiosity. Because even among the aspects of life in Amsterdam that do not clearly or directly derive from the drug culture, there is always the vague sense that they might, and that’s what makes it all so curious. The thing that separates the city’s famed red light district from others around the world is how visual it is. This is not just, it is not even mainly, a marketplace for sex. It is a show, women displaying themselves with bravado, sometimes playful, other times heartbreaking, for an audience so varied that it even includes, from time to time, the British family with the little child, lost on the way to the Anne Frank museum. In any other city, the little kid wouldn’t even know that he was in the red light district. And the red light district, and Amsterdam, is very much about those interactions too.

Perhaps this is part of why nowhere in town—not even its red light district—is there anything truly seedy or truly scary. It feels more like yet another urban thing that is, like the Van Gogh Museum, just designed to be seen—and perhaps this one is even designed while under, or designed to be seen under, the influence of something. Only, one might argue, a city planner in the intense visual depths of a mushroom trip would think to decorate a red-light district by illuminating its prostitutes (and the beds and sink in the background of their rooms) with real red lights that reflect off the canals and iterate beneath troupes of tourists whose moods span every possible point on the axis between sensory detatchment and urgent genital need.

The omnipotent haze of the drug culture, though, also has its subtler forms, and these are some of the most memorable. At some point, the question of whether or not the experience is about the drugs melts away, and the collective memory of your time in Amsterdam melts into one long trip: travel as escapist entertainment. One day my friends and I were meandering between an out-of-the-way coffeeshop and a third-floor pancake house, and we noticed rows and rows of people stopped along the sidewalks around the bicycle fisherman in the secondary canal below. We, too, stopped to watch.

The bicycle fisherman was a waterproof man, dressed from head to toe in municipal orange, sitting atop a long trawler that glided along the still water at an almost imperceptibly slow speed. He looked calm, practically sleepy, as he reclined in a spinning chair in the winter sun, his hand on the classic joystick of heavy machinery, lowering the forklift into the water and retrieving some of the hundreds of bicycles that sat at the bottom of the shallow canals. Every dip of the tongs into the mess of olive goo that flows beneath the city’s gently arching bridges would yield four or five partially crushed bikes and toss them into the heap of others, like a junkyard growing in the middle of the long boat.

Are these just the realities of living in a city of canals? Do that many people really throw their bikes, or ride their bikes, into the water? Or was the bicycle fishing a show by the stoners and for the stoners, a work of interactive performance art in which the city’s department of public works was involuntarily chosen to play the lead role?

Or did we just imagine it all?