The Most Unremarkable Purchase in Switzerland

Getting weed in Germany has always been a negotiation between optimism and misery. You can haunt the Görlitzer Park and hope the person who approaches you isn’t selling dyed lawn clippings. You can rely on the eccentric in the seventh-floor apartment who hasn’t opened his curtains since 2009 and greets every visitor with a lengthy discussion of chemtrails. Or you can order something through whatever dark channel currently exists and wait to see whether the package or the police arrive first.

Switzerland, meanwhile, decided to just put it in Lidl.

The company behind the product is called The Botanicals, and they’ve started supplying Swiss discount stores with hemp cigarettes—pre-rolled and in loose-leaf form for rolling your own—grown in Swiss greenhouses and indoor facilities according to GACP quality standards. A 1.5-gram packet runs about seventeen euros. Legal. On the shelf. Between the checkout queue and the seasonal chocolate.

The THC content sits within Switzerland’s legal ceiling for commercially sold hemp products, so this isn’t quite the same experience as buying a joint. But it’s closer to that than anything you can purchase at a supermarket in Germany, where the regulatory conversation about cannabis proceeds at the pace of a very cautious glacier. Bavaria reaching this point within a human lifetime is, let’s say, an optimistic projection.

What’s interesting about the Swiss move isn’t really the product but the normalization of it. Putting hemp cigarettes in a Lidl removes the entire apparatus of transgression that surrounds the subject in Germany—the furtive transaction, the deniability, the whole performance. It’s just a thing you buy because you want it. The packaging is clean. The flower content is printed on the box. No cultural weight to it at all, which is either liberating or slightly deflating depending on how much you’ve enjoyed the cultural weight.