The post Copenhagen Caper Exposes Cannabis Crackdown appeared first on High Times.
Media accounts mostly played it for laughs when a confused pot dealer cluelessly got into a police car outside the famous squatter community of Christiania in Copenhagen on December 21, apparently thinking it was a taxi-cab. The cops searched him and found 1,000 pre-rolled joints.
The police statement on the caper fairly gloated: “Last night a cannabis dealer from Christiania who wanted to get home quickly got into a taxi. He received a big surprise when he realized it was actually a police car he was sitting in. The police officers were happy to see him since he was carrying around 1,000 joints.”
But this overzealous attitude on the part of the cops in the supposedly liberal Danish capital is worrying.
Cannabis in Christiania, Copenhagen
Copenhagen’s The Local notes in its report on the incident that the police have beefed up their presence around Christiania of late, carrying out several raids and employing drones in a crackdown on dealing in the counter-culture enclave.
A raid on the same day as the poor joint dealer’s mediagenic mishap resulted in a number of vendors’ stands within Christiania being demolished and several kilos of cannabis confiscated.
Christiania is a former military barracks squatted as a “freetown” since the early 1970s and officially recognized as a self-governing entity by Copenhagen municipal authorities since an agreement negotiated with residents in 2011. But cannabis dealing in the enclave has continued to attract unwanted attention from law enforcement.
This latest crackdown on Christiania comes just a year after the Danish government, for yet a fourth time, turned down a request by Copenhagen municipal authorities to allow the city to carry out a trial cannabis