One Border Over

There are three ways to get weed in Germany and none of them are good. You hang around Görli, hoping to find someone who isn’t selling you dyed weeds. You rely on the paranoid guy on the seventh floor—the one terrified of aluminum foil, airplanes, sunlight. Or you order from the darknet and leave the door unlocked because you know what’s coming.

Switzerland took a different route. You just walk into Lidl and buy legal hemp cigarettes. The Botanicals company grows them—cannabis in automated greenhouses, proper equipment, quality standards. The product is pure: dried buds of Cannabis sativa L., cut and portioned into 1.5 gram packets. Around 17 euros. You pick it up like coffee or bread.

The gap between those two states is genuinely strange to think about. Same language family, same economic zone, separated by a border and suddenly the illegal becomes mundane, the contraband becomes grocery. I have no idea when Germany catches up. Bavaria? Never, probably. But standing in a Lidl buying weed feels like a preview of some stupidly distant future that’s already happening somewhere else.