Damn, was there a year ago and yeah it was pretty bad. Hopefully it evolves into something cool
Iirc, in the 70s or 80s they pushed out biker gangs spreading h, so I don’t think they’ll fail.
They’ve tried over and over again to get the gangs out. Like every couple of years the hippies would tear down the shops and/or barricade the street, but then after a week the pushers would be back. https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/overblik-de-fire-mest-markante-forsoeg-paa-lukke-pusher-street (use your desired translating service, if your elementary schooling didn’t include Danish)
It’s not the general consensus in Denmark, but to me it has, until recently, always just looked like purely PR related distancing. This time does seem different though.
I don’t know what happened, it has been an open secret that the gangs paid money to the Christiania community, and provided other services to the community as well, in an effort to affect the decision making processes https://www.information.dk/indland/2012/06/politiet-rockere-paavirker-christianias-styreform?page=1 (again in Danish, you really should try it out on duolingo) Maybe the gangs stopped, or there were an actual change of opinion in the community.
We may have met there 😆.
And yeah, I would have stayed longer in Christiania when I visited Copenhagen with my children if there wasn’t all that drug.
Why Denmark does not legalize marijuana is beyond me.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a bid to reclaim the street from drug dealers, this Saturday they began physically digging it up, armed with spades and crowbars.
“To safeguard that Christiania will continue to be a vibrant, colourful, creative part of Denmark, it needs to be a place without organised criminal gangs.”
Ordinarily this T-shaped strip is the epicentre of Denmark’s cannabis trade, where so-called pushers hawk weed from behind makeshift stacks of beer crates and plywood market stalls, labelled with names like Green Rocket and Blue Dream.
Found within a kilometre of the Danish parliament, Freetown Christiania was established in 1971 when a bunch of anarchists and hippies squatted inside a vacant military base.
Today 1,000 residents, including 250 children, live in the graffiti-covered barracks and wooden cottages along Copenhagen’s historic ramparts.
In an extraordinary shift, they collaborated for several months with Copenhagen’s Lord Mayor Sophie Haestorp Andersen, Justice Minister Hummelgaard and police over a new plan.
The original article contains 1,197 words, the summary contains 154 words. Saved 87%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I was there in 2004, back then it was still a pretty special place.