Photo by Matt Desouza
If you’re not in Colorado or Washington, and you’ve ever spent more than $100 on weed at once, you’ve probably taken a relaxing vacation away from criminality in Amsterdam. That’s because smoking a joint legally in a beautiful European city, surrounded by both erudite Dutchmen and shit-drunk Scottish stag parties, is generally much more preferable to hot-boxing your friend’s car in a parking lot, slamming the music off, and ducking behind the seats every time another car drives by.
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But where are other Europeans supposed to go to snort, smoke, or ingest in peace? Cokeheads used to have that Bolivian jail where you could buy fishscale direct from the prisoners, but that’s now banished to backpacker lore, ruined by swaths of international media attention and a warden who realized that presiding over a state-funded gak factory probably wouldn’t look great on his résumé.
In 2013, the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) conducted a study of 42 European cities, analyzing local waste-water (sewage, essentially) to determine which drug was most widely used in each area. Some of the results were as you’d expect, but there were a few in there that stuck out a little, and those are the ones we’ve laid out below in our guide to Europe’s secret drug capitals.
ANTWERP, BELGIUM
Photo via Jean-Pol Grandmont
Shockingly, Antwerp—a city full of diamond traders and fashion students—is also full of cocaine. In fact, Europe’s coke capital is so keen on the stuff that nefarious pigeon fanciers have started doping their racing birds with performance-enhancing gak.
One potential reason behind the Belgian capital’s fondness for blow is that almost 25 percent of the cocaine shipped to Europe from South America makes its way through the country, and a large chunk of that through the port of Antwerp. Conveniently—and kind of unbelievably—only 2 percent of the containers passing through the port each year are actually screened, meaning not a lot gets seized.
And lucky for the city’s residents, that bountiful supply translates into low, low prices; at an average of $68 a gram, it kind of makes sense that it’s so widely used.
LAZARAT, ALBANIA
Cannabis growing all over the hills of Lazarat. Photo by Axel Kronholm
The bucolic town of Lazarat is slightly different from many other pastoral Albanian towns, in that its green pastures are mostly made up of cannabis plants, which produce around 900 tons of bud every year. Families can survive off a harvest for a whole year—and growing really is a family business, which is probably why it’s not a good idea to fuck with the kush farmers of Lazarat.
A couple of weeks ago, for example, 800 police surrounded the town. Upon realizing they were boxed-in, residents decided to base their response on the archetypal Michael Bay drug dealer—by grabbing some RPGs and machine guns, and blasting the overwhelmed cops off their turf. Thousands of plants were destroyed, but in the end the police retreated.
DRESDEN, GERMANY
Photo via Jiuguang Wang
According to the EMCDDA study, Dresden is hugely into crystal meth. Weirdly, they’re also most into hitting the pipe on a Thursday, when the consumption level spikes drastically compared with the rest of the week.
Being so close to the Czech border helps the drug trade along nicely, but agents still bust between 200 to 300 drug kitchens in the region every year. Of course, a child could make meth (if he or she knew where to buy ephedrine and had profoundly apathetic parents), so it’s still widely available—to the point where some dealers have introduced a loyalty system, handing out coupons to frequent customers so they don’t switch to another supplier.
MIDDLESBROUGH, ENGLAND
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
The Yorkshire town of Middlesbrough, once known for fucking smashing it in the iron and steel game, now has the highest rate of serious opioid use in Europe. Named the “worst place to live in Britain” by revered cultural commentators Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer, the town also has the UK’s highest estimated number of opiate and/or crack users (one in 40 adults), and intravenous drug use is three times more than the national estimate.
In case that wasn’t depressing enough, it’s not only class-A drugs that Middlesbrough has a taste for; it’s also the worst area in the country for alcohol-related hospital admissions.
NOVI SAD, SERBIA
Photo via Flickr user Ivan Aleksic
Bizarrely, considering you can literally buy it over the counter there, Amsterdam is not the leading consumer of cannabis in Europe. According to EMCDDA, that prize goes to Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, with the Dutch capital coming in second and Paris taking third.
Records show that, during the 15th and 16th century, there was industrial-level hemp production in the province of Vojvodina, to which Novi Sad belongs. Amsterdam didn’t get its first coffee shop until the 1970s, so Serbia’s stoners clearly have heritage on their side.
FRANKFURT, GERMANY
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
In 2008, there were 928 drug offenses registered for every 100,000 Frankfurt residents, and the city is still Germany’s drug capital. That either means police don’t spend nearly as much time pissing about with menial stop and searches as they do elsewhere, or Germans just aren’t that into drugs. Mind you, a glance at any Berliner’s jaw past 11:00 PM is a pretty effective way to shut down that latter argument.
Frankfurt’s international airport and other high-speed transport links—namely the railway and autobahn—makes it a handy hub for smugglers. But it does seem that drug runners are passing through rather than sticking around; since an epidemic of drug-related deaths in the 1990s—and after measures named the “Frankfurt Way” were introduced to tackle it—the amount of drug fatalities has dropped massively.
GLASGOW, SCOTLAND
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Glasgow isn’t all just Buckie and heroin; cannabis raids are common there too. In fact, thanks to expat Triad gangsters founding a bunch of weed farms, Scotland now exports more bud than it imports—increasingly making the country one of Europe’s largest exporters of hash and marijuana.
RASQUERA, SPAIN
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
The little Catalonian town of Rasquera is only home to about 1,000 people, but—like much of Spain—is in a horrendous amount of debt. After the town called a debt crisis meeting, its council officials voted to lease seven hectares of public farmland to a bunch of stoners so they could grow some cannabis “for therapeutic usage and to pimp.” Pimping—in this case—means “getting baked.”
The mayor of the city claims that harvesting and smoking weed for private use isn’t prohibited in Spain. Which is kind of true, but not really in the way he wants it to be; while it’s fine to grow and smoke in the privacy of your own home, that’s only because the reach of the state’s drug policy is limited to public space. Unfortunately, all that farmland isn’t inside anyone’s home and is very much public space.
Regardless, his hope is to raise around $1.7 million out of the leased land—and good luck to him.
