Kreuzberg's Görlitzer Park, Berlin. Merlijn Hoek/Flickr. Some rights reserved.In the mid-1980s, Timothy Leary – the American evangelist for drug use – came to visit Germany, and one day, he turned to the journalist who had volunteered to drive him around – Mathias Bröckers – and explained why he was thrilled to be here, of all places. “Germany is the fatherland of Rausch!” he exclaimed, using the German term for intoxication. “Heroin, cocaine, crystal meth – everything was invented here!”. Even LSD – his own most beloved drug – was created just a few miles across the border, in German-speaking Switzerland.
Germany gave birth to the world’s most feared drugs, and then sought to drown its own baby.
Matthias Bröckers had never thought of his country quite like that before – as the font of the world’s most feared and sought-after intoxicants. He had been smoking cannabis since he was sixteen, and he later became one of the founders of the newspaper, Die Tageszeitung (taz), which has the most honest coverage of drug policy in Germany. But he only later began to fully explore the strange story of his country’s relationship with the world’s most feared drugs: Germany gave birth to them, and then sought to drown its own baby.
