This morning, employees of Amsterdam's de Dampkring ("the Smoke Ring") coffee-shop franchise have convened at the unbohemian hour of 9 a.m. for a daylong refresher course on the finer points of effective and responsible weed salesmanship. Not long from now, I'm scheduled to spend a week behind the hash bar at one of de Dampkring's two local branches, but what I know about the art of marijuana retail—not to mention Holland's perverse and hazy drug statutes—wouldn't fill a golf-ball dimple. So at the request of the shops' rightly nervous manager, I've crossed the pond early to undergo a spot of preprofessional cramming.

The seminar is taking place on the second floor of the Dampkring's forward-looking modern branch, whose decor tends toward diamond plate and brushed steel, in deliberate disdain, the owner tells me, for the hippy-shit aesthetics, smoke-browned Hendrix posters, and Jamaican tricolor of the last-gen Amsterdam dope joint. Despite the ineradicable skunk's-tail perfume leaching from the Sheetrock, the shop this morning is a pretty faithful imitation of a high school classroom—from the distracted bespectacled lecturer (a representative from a nonprofit drug-counseling agency) futzing with the overhead projector to the two icily pretty cheerleader types giggling in malicious-sounding Dutch while stocking their desktops with schoolgirl tackle (moisturizer, makeup, chocolates, tissue packets) to the rearmost dunce row, where I've been quarantined with my translator, who told me to call him Harry Resin. A merry Canadian in his midthirties who has lived in Amsterdam for the past decade or so, Harry was drafted into translation detail by Dampkring management and is not delighted about it. "I haven't been up this early in years," he says.

Harry, who formerly ran a seed business and now spends his days as a cannabis-policy gadfly, is also unhappy because we're forbidden to get high during class. On a typical day, Harry likes to spark a joint the size of a cornucopia shortly after getting out of bed and to spark another one every fifteen minutes or so until it's time to go to sleep at night. By his own account, Harry smokes ten to fourteen ounces per month (in the neighborhood of $5,000 worth if he were paying retail, which he does not). So, thwarted for the next few hours, Harry impatiently rolls one hefty spliff of G13-Amnesia Haze after another, lining them up on his desk in anticipation of the noontime lunch break.

Our instructor opens the session with the gentle question "How does it feel to work in a coffee shop?" Contrary to my conception of Holland as a freethinking sort of nation where it's no more fraught to suck a public bongload than an after-dinner mint, a number of people confess feeling a sense of vague disgrace at working in the industry.

"I guess I'm sort of a source of shame for my family," says one dealer (as the hash-bar staffers are known).

"I don't tell people," says a cheerleader. "I just say I work in hospitality."

"I say the same thing," offers Dampkring owner Paul Wilhelm, whose unflagging smirk and mirthfully squinted eyes give him the look of a man trapped in a mild and hilarious g-force machine. "It used to be cannabis was nothing; it was spinach. These days, if you say you own a coffee shop, people think you're a criminal."

Despite the smoggy lamentations of American stoners—"Man, why can't we just be cool about weed like the Dutch?"—Dutch industry pros increasingly despair of Holland's cannabis status quo and look with envy at the situation in the United States. With pot decriminalized in thirteen states and medical marijuana metastasizing onto ballot measures nationwide, America's cannabis policy is reaching a tipping point. Weed advocates on both sides of the Atlantic are hoping we'll craft something smarter and more durable than the jerry-rigged system reigning in Holland. While part of my reason for coming to Amsterdam was to get a glimpse of what may become America's newest retail sector, after a conversation or two with people here, Holland looks less like a blueprint for America's pending cannabis legislation and more a cautionary exhibit of mistakes we shouldn't make.

Marijuana and establishments that sell it remain illegal in Holland, but the industry operates more or less in plain sight through a statutory gray area known as gedoogbeleid, roughly "tolerance." The tolerance policy protects smokers possessing five grams or less but cuts local government plenty of prosecutorial slack to harry shop owners at the first shift of Holland's culture wars. The national statutes are sufficiently loose and leaky that almost forty years after the first coffee shop opened its doors, the center-right Christian Democratic Appeal—until recently Holland's ruling party—has pledged to shutter every hash bar on Dutch soil. And while coffee shops operate at the pleasure of city government, not national parties like the CDA, Holland's dope outlets have undergone a substantial die-off of late. In 1997, at least 1,019 coffee shops were doing business in the Netherlands. But after a quiet epidemic of denied shop-license renewals and selective enforcement of gedoogbeleid's caprices, today's number is closer to 700. Rotterdam alone closed a third of its shops in 2008. These are anxious times in the dope trade, which is why, through voluntary measures like today's clinic, shop owners are doing all they can to stay on the good side of the law.