Neighborhood in Copenhagen owned by stoners wants to kick out the gangs that sell weed there.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/06/travel/denmark-christiania-pusher-street-shut-intl/index.html

The City of of Copenhagen, occupied by peace loving and drug tolerant Danes, has a neighborhood that is dedicated to the great hallucinogenic producing weed nicknamed Pot; (Pusher Street.) Back in the freewheeling 70’s, a group of hippies seized a run down army base, stole the property there, and started openly selling weed. And of course, consuming vast quantities themselves. This is the Freetown Christiana neighborhood.

This would no longer seem like an oddity, as we have many streets in the US where drug addicts openly sell all manner of drugs, including crystal meth and tranque. Nothing cute about them. But this neighborhood has traded on its 60’s infused artwork and a competitive hashish trade to draw people to go see it. One million such people.

At my family’s insistence, we visited this “attraction” when in Copenhagen. I wanted to see the Carlsberg brewery, (and get an alcohol infused high, rather than the THC variety) but NO! We had to see the world headquarters of misguided nostalgia for the hippie lifestyle that went out of vogue in 1972.

I can tell you that my own reaction was fear, as I walked by the merchants selling hash illegally on “Pusher Street.” Now, the illegal selling of drugs is done, by definition, by criminals. So rather than cute, grey haired hippies wearing tie dye shirts and birkenstock sandals, I saw shifty and scary thugs. The buildings there were ramshackle, the street dirty. How this came to be a tourist destination, boggled my admittedly square mind. I hurried my family out as fast as possible.

This proved to be a prescient inclination, as the drug trade on Pusher Street had become dominated by violent gangs. You know, just at it is everywhere. People are murdered, crime rampant. Yet tourism persists there.

(I doubt our American semi legal drug streets get much traffic from the TripAdvisor sites or mayors’ offices. Of course, our essentially decriminalized drug market streets are just grey and dirty and awash in used needles and human waste. They only get 2.5 stars in the LA Michelin guidebook.)

After 50 years of such a questionable environment, and many fruitless attempts by the police to clean up the illegal trade, now the denizens of Freedom Christiana want to drive out the criminals by tearing up the street. Why they believe that literally tearing out perfectly functional cobblestones will deter crime, is a mystery. Won’t the gangs just walk on the replacement concrete street? Maybe a hint that hashish consumption inn Copenhagen persists unabated, and that the Mayor and Justice Minister pictured are regular consumers themselves.

If the Copenhagen solution works, I suggest that we tear up the macadam on OUR drug market streets, which would neatly clean up the drug trade. (Unlikely). Alternatively, the thought of using drug addicts as a tourist destination may be just the thing to bring tourists to otherwise ignored city streets across America. We can hand out free tie dye clothing to residents, invite artists to paint the buildings in 60’s themed designs, and charge admission.

Hey, it has to work better than what we are doing now, right? Hahahahah. The Danes should return to raiding England, or something more historically successful and less mock worthy.