People like drugs.
Legal, illegal, licit, illicit, whatevs, people like drugs.
Here's the outro from a 2019 post, "Berlin in the Golden Twenties":
My impression of the time and place is a bit darker. As noted in Sir Mick Jagger: David Bowie is 'kind of weird' (how 'bout Bowie as a Weimar Gigolo?):
...As for me, the whole Isherwood, Caberet thing has about as much appeal as this pic of one of the demi-monde, "Koks Emil" der Kokain-Verkäufer (the cocaine seller), a nasty looking piece of work:
Mr. Bowie would have done well in Weimar Berlin.
The 'gigolo' link in the 'Sir Mick' post has rotted so here's another route to "David Bowie's Forgotten, Campy Berlin Gigolo Movie" at The Awl.
Campy sounds fun. The ineffable sadness of the he-whores and she-whores
who overstayed the great Berlin party of the 1920's, who aged 20 years
in a half-decade, or didn't age at all because they were dead, that's
the other part of the story.
And the headliner from VICE, January 11:
No-one is sure what Europe's largest legal weed market will look like. But behind the scenes, cannabis firms are gearing up for a piece of a £3.3 billion market.
NEUMÜNSTER, Germany – Protected by barbed-wire fences and 24cm-thick concrete walls, Aphria RX’s high security cannabis-growing facility is currently producing 1.1 tonnes of weed for medicinal use each year under a contract with Germany’s Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices....*****....“Just wait until you see this,” grins Thorsten Kolisch, a bespectacled scientist in crisp white overalls, before pushing a button to uncover the contents of his state of the art laboratory which uses UV lighting to maximise plant growth. “It's like taking a hallucinogen.”As the window blind rises, a truly psychedelic scene is revealed: hundreds of towering cannabis plants coloured a deep purple; others are tinged with violet, mauve and lilac. The air is sticky with THC. “Now look over there and look back,” says Kolisch.
The previously whitewalled corridors have turned green. And the laboratory is now a pristine white, apart from the rows of luminous green weed. “Your eyes are adjusting to our special lighting recipe,” adds Kolisch, who is general manager of Canadian firm Aphria RX’s facility in Neumünster, which last July dispatched the country’s first ever legal medicinal cannabis harvest.
Things are about to change dramatically for Germany’s legal, and illegal, cannabis trade. In November, Germany’s so-called “traffic light” coalition government went green and agreed on plans to legalise the sale of cannabis for recreational use. “[Legalisation] will control the quality, prevent trade of contaminated substances, and guarantee the protection of minors,” the pact states, noting that the social impact of the law will be evaluated after four years.....
....MUCH MORE
