The Man With the Hash and the Registered Business License

Oliver Becker had a book to sell and a point to make, and his plan was to park a colorful camper van in Görlitzer Park and sell Moroccan hash out of it in broad daylight. The book was called LEGALISATOR. He had, notably, registered a legitimate business for this purpose. Berlin’s bureaucracy at work.

Görlitzer Park—the Görli, in local shorthand—has been the city’s most openly drug-traded green space for years. The dealing is so visible and so constant that it functions almost as civic infrastructure at this point. Becker, who’d styled himself a cannabis activist since the movement’s early days, wanted to make the absurdity of prohibition legible by performing it at full volume. A mobile coffeeshop. A registered business. Moroccan hash exclusively—not weed, he clarified, to avoid stepping on the other dealers already working the park. Thoughtful of him.

The police promised to intervene. Becker promised, in response, a hunger strike in the tradition of Gandhi, lasting if necessary until the Berlin Hemp Parade on August 9th. Fifty days. For a man selling hash from a camper van in a city park to promote a self-published book, it was an admirably specific contingency plan.

Whether any of it moved the needle on legalization is probably beside the point. As political theater in a city that loves political theater, it was at least committed.