The Last High in Görlitzer Park

Berlin’s Görlitzer Park had been operating as a de facto tolerance zone for years: an informal economy of weed, dealers and buyers coexisting with the rest of the park’s life, the police mostly looking the other way. Not legal, exactly, but not seriously pursued either. The kind of arrangement that works until something happens that makes it impossible to ignore.

What happened was that children digging in a playground sandbox found cocaine wrapped in small pellets and mistook them for beads. A mother’s account cut through all the abstract policy debate: It happened with my friend’s child—it had a joint stub in its mouth. The drugs are being massively hidden in the playgrounds. What has to happen for something to change? Does a child have to swallow a packet of coke and die right there on the playground? Hard to argue with that on its own terms.

The Senate responded by ending tolerance entirely—no more 10-15 gram allowances in the park, no more looking away. Crackdown framed as child protection. The counter-argument from the people who organized a mass smoke-in in the park was sharper than I’d expected: a city warehousing asylum seekers in overcrowded gyms and emergency shelters had decided that weed in Görlitzer Park was the problem worth solving. The misalignment of civic priorities was their point, not that cocaine near playgrounds was fine.

Both things can be true at once. The park had a real problem. The Senate also had better problems it was avoiding. The smoke-in was the park saying it knew the difference—that being used as political cover for tough-on-crime optics, while harder questions got deferred indefinitely, was something the people there weren’t going to absorb in silence.