“But don’t the Italians ever just go drinking and cut loose?” you might ask. It’s not that they don’t, it’s just that you don’t see two distinct sides of them like you do with the Japanese. Maybe it’s because they have a culture that just accepts it when people go off the rails a bit—even when it has nothing to do with alcohol.
Wine is a huge part of Italian culture, so they’re not as sensitive to drinking as the Japanese. As an example, I’ve been to multiple wine events where you can taste as much wine as you want, but you never see police cars waiting outside the venue to subject the guests to sobriety tests as they leave. Of course, drunk driving is against the law in Italy as well.
Seems contradictory, right?
Actually, it’s not. Italy is interesting in that it takes a lax approach to prohibiting alcohol or enforcing the rules because there are people whose jobs involve selecting and trading wine. Still, you occasionally come across unexpected crackdowns when people carelessly get behind the wheel after drinking. Even if you just have one beer and even if you’re traveling down some deserted backroad, if you get caught—that’s it. Your license is taken away and you have to regularly undergo testing and submit proof that you’re staying sober. You’re forced to survive without a car for a painfully long time.
Maybe it’s because the Italians have such a relaxed relationship to alcohol, but they’ve also recently allowed shops to legally sell marijuana. The fact that it is absolutely forbidden to have marijuana in your possession in Japan has likely affected my perspective, but I am so beside myself when I see the pot shops pop up that I’ve never been able to walk into one.
People often think of the coffee shops in Amsterdam when they think of marijuana. You’re not allowed to drink on the streets in Amsterdam, but having marijuana is perfectly fine. This is another custom that blows my mind, but when I saw completely normal-looking people just standing around calmly smoking it and the town seeming to take it all in stride, I could almost make sense of it in some small way.
When Italy legalized marijuana in 2016, the law allowed both the buying and selling of the flowers—but you still weren’t allowed to ingest it by smoking or eating edibles. The Italians didn’t get why the law was written that way, but they may have realized that like the laws for drinking and driving, the law probably would have some flexibility to it.
Either way, a mild type of marijuana called “marijuana light” is legal in Italy. I eventually decided to walk into a store that sold cannabis food products and ask them about it. I was amazed to see all the different kinds of products that had been developed—everything from marijuana-infused pasta and coffee to pesto.
The staff shared a lot of interesting stories with me, including those of people who had health conditions that didn’t improve with drugs but that got better after eating cannabis food products. It seemed a lot like doctors recommending a glass of red wine a day—or put more simply, everything in moderation.
