From Experiment to Ritual
Berlin has three landmarks. The TV Tower, the Brandenburg Gate, and the dealer. Once you’ve actually settled into the city—not just the apartment, but the rhythm of it, the particular texture of its nights—it doesn’t take long before you know someone. And that someone knows someone who knows someone. Then you’re standing around the corner with two other people and a guy who smiles like he’s genuinely happy to see you. You talk about life, about whatever relationship is currently complicating things, about death—dealers talk about death with strange ease—and then he puts a few small bags in your hand and gets on his bike. See you next time.
In 2009, 1,331 people died in Berlin from drug-related causes. The city leads the country in that statistic every single year. Nobody discusses this at parties. The nights in the trendy districts of what was once a divided city are loud and long and grinding—physically exhausting in a way that seems almost hostile to sobriety. Speed, MDMA, acid, whatever’s going around—these aren’t seen as departures from normal life, they’re load-bearing parts of it. Illegality is an abstraction. Availability is not.
No one thinks of themselves as dependent. That’s not how it feels from the inside. Swallowing a pill or racking a line fits naturally into the night alongside everything else you’re consuming—just another variable in the evening’s chemistry. Something to get you going. Something to hold fatigue back past the point where your body would otherwise quit. The image of the destroyed junkie passed out in the corner is so distant from the imagined epic night that it doesn’t register as a destination. And yet everyone knows someone—a former friend, someone from a few years back—who never found their way out of it and now exists somewhere between present and absent, scooped out.
Demonizing drugs wholesale and filing them under "addicts and losers" is a comfortable position that has very little to do with how they actually function in the world. They move through every layer of society. They always have. Beer, cigarettes, heroin—the packaging changes, the pharmacology changes, but the human appetite for altered states holds steady across thousands of years. Legal frameworks try to draw lines, and most people respond to those lines with mild amusement and then proceed anyway.
A bit of experimentation is fine. You live once. What’s the worst that could happen? Once this, once that—and at low doses, with decent sleep and some self-awareness, it often genuinely doesn’t hurt. The problem isn’t the first time or even the fifth. It’s when the exception becomes the default. Regular uniqueness. When you’re cutting lines before breakfast on a Tuesday not because it’s a special occasion but just to see what’s happening. When you’re swallowing something with a smiley on it just to find the motivation to get off the couch. When weed is consuming more of your day than cooking, doing laundry, and jerking off combined—and that’s not a metaphor, that’s a particular Tuesday morning.
As with everything that carries real potential for dependency, it comes down to the difference between using and needing, between playing and being played. Between living and whatever comes after that. If you hand your future over to something that can permanently rewrite your consciousness, you’re not just accepting the consequences—you’re taking on an ongoing obligation, to yourself and the people around you, to keep checking the balance. Between one-off and ritual. That line moves quietly, and then one day it’s behind you.