Berlin park defines zones where dealers can sell cannabis

Görlitzer Park, located in the trendy Kreuzberg district of southern Berlin, is notorious for its drug sales. Faced with repeated failures by the police to chase away the vendors, the park manager has decided to define specific zones where dealers can operate without disturbing passers-by.

The «Gorli Park», the Mecca of drug dealing

Any Brlinois looking to stock up on cannabis knows that they can find it in Görlitz Park whatever the day, time or weather. The park is also infamous for a 2014 incident involving a knife fight between two suspected drug dealers and a cafe owner. The conflicts and intense trade in cannabis and other substances in the park have led the Ministry of the Interior to adopt an extremely repressive approach, increasing the number of police officers, raids and checks, to no avail.

Police action has so far failed to stem the flow of illegal drugs into the park. The increased police presence in the park has simply led dealers to increasingly relocate their activities to the streets. The mayor of the Kreuzberg district, Monika Herrmann, had proposed a pilot project to set up coffee shops in the district to take the cannabis trade out of the hands of the dealers by depriving them of customers. The project never saw the light of day.

Deal zones«

Faced with a situation that had become unmanageable, with a park filled alternately with dealers and police officers, park manager Cengiz Demirci decided to set up zones where dealers could operate. These zones are defined by spray-painted pink markings. The idea is to keep dealers away from the park entrance, where their presence can be intimidating, to ensure that they do not approach passers-by, and to separate groups of dealers to avoid confrontations.

The measure was widely criticized by some members of Angela Merkel's CDU party, including Burkard Dregger, chairman of the CDU parliamentary group, and Kurt Wansner. In a declaration They accuse the park manager and the local council, which employs the manager but was not consulted on the matter, of «encouraging illegal activities» and «supporting organized crime». Burkard Dregger declared: «The manager's demarcations in Görli Park are an invitation to break the law and a betrayal of the residents (...) the mayor's office has now officially converted the park into a drug market».

For his part, the manager defends himself: «This method has purely practical reasons. We are not legalizing the sale of drugs. He adds that a more effective solution would be to give dealers work permits. Most of them are asylum seekers or illegal migrants. »If they did that, then 90% of them would stop dealing immediately,« adds Demirci. The park attracted attention in 2013 when a refugee camp was set up nearby at Oranienplatz.

The newspaper The Local went to meet from some of the dealers who don't seem convinced by this initiative either, because it doesn't solve the basic problem, which is that, unable to work, dealers have no other option than to deal to earn money.