Pot on the Prinsessegade

by Barrett Thornhill

From the Copenhagen train station take Bus 8 in the direction of the Bodenhoffs Plads, get off at Prinsessegade.

Welcome to Christiania Freetown, Denmark. This is the lovely place that those whirlwind travelers who write Let's Go Europe tell you to avoid due to “visible trash and frequent police raids.” But what do Harvard kids know.

Three buddies and I had been roaming Europe “with fly unzipped” (as a former teacher described it) for over two weeks. Starting our trek in Amsterdam, then winding down through Germany and the Czech Republic, we were now heading back up to Denmark on the Eurorail.

The trip from Prague to Copenhagen is about ten hours, and the mungish reek that fermented in our train car during that time was grim. The car wasn't crammed with gamy Frenchmen, just American teenagers whose hostels did not include the luxury of showers and whose backpacks could only hold so many clean clothes.

We weren't all flooding to Copenhagen for the museums or sights (although six-foot blondes beauties in tight leather pants are sights indeed). We were going to see Phish.

Following Phish was not the impetus of my overseas journey, well not totally at least, let's call it a nice coincidence that their European tour matched mine. Their venue was Christiania's Grey Hall, and for three days that's where I lingered.

The history of Christiania is a bumpy ride. The town began as an “experiment;” a hippie dream to create a life of freedom. In 1971 a group of people knocked down a wall on Prinsessegade street because they wanted something green to look at.

The people stumbled into an abandoned Navy barracks; later that year a huge group of homeless youngsters stumbled onto the idea of using the old base to fulfill their dreams of creating a alternative society of communal living.

The Christianites organized slowly, creating a social-democratic government of sorts, and Parliament gave the freetown political acceptance as a “social experiment.” For years the police earnestly tried to force out Christiania's inhabitants, who had too strong a liking (for the police's tastes) for hashish and other illegal drugs, but there were just too many squatters.

When heroin had its heyday in the late `70s, the Copenhagen Police Department raided Christiania constantly, but the free town's elders (nearly all of whom favored hash) were just as eager to eradicate junk from the hash market. In 1980 the town tossed out heroin dealers, and the junkies were offered treatment.

In 1982 Sweden began a smear campaign violently asserting that Christiania was the drug mecca of the north and “the root of all evil.” The town folk strolled over to Sweden and launched their own “Love Sweden” campaign full of art exhibitions marches through Stockholm and Malmo.

As the political melee over normalization and legalization continued, alternative musical groups flocked to Christiania in the '80s, and the town developed a popular artistic scene — music, dance, and graffiti art.

By the town's 20th anniversary drugs were again a political issue, and in September of 1992 the Copenhagen police renewed their periodic campaigns to rid Christiania of hash. Priests, schoolchildren, and unlucky tourists were body searched, innocent people were teargassed, random drug raids occurred, and Prinsessegade was barricaded.

The scene got ugly. The townfolk, Amnesty International, bookoo lawyers, the Government's Commission on Justice and of course the media created a ruckus; the Ministry of Defense, which “owns” the town, finally ended the police state after 18 grueling months with little evidence of any reduction in hash sales to show for the massive effort.

“Let it be” becomes the new unofficial policy.

My Danish friend from high school helped me out on the current situation. “Christania is like the `drug Capital' of Copenhagen. It's like an old Navy base, which has been taken over by the `outcast' of Copenhagen, about a thousand of them.

“This means all the junkies and all the criminals and all the people who refuse to pay taxes and prefer to live without gas, water, electricity and so forth. The thing is, that the police can't come there, because nobody there likes the police, and the Danish population has sort of accepted this area, because it's only `victimless crime' that's committed in there.”

On the train I met a lot of Christiania's fans, and the rumor was that marijuana, hash, and shrooms were “legal” at the venue. No one was quite sure though, so I really did not know what to expect as I got off Bus 8. But as my grandfather always said, “If it smells follow it,” and smell it I did.

It was five hours before the doors to the Grey Hall would open to the 200 some-odd American Phish fans, so my friends and I decided to check out ole freetown. The first thing I saw was a huge wooden plaque that said, “Welcome to Christiania Freetown. No Photographs allowed.”

The main dirt street is properly named Pusherstreet. Small wooden kiosks line both side of the 15 foot wide path; the merchandise is displayed en masse priced and labeled. Northern Lights, Skunk, White Widow, Redhair, for marijuana; Moroccan, Afghanistan, for hash. Mexican or Jamaican for shrooms. All of the 150 or so vendors have basically the same stuff and the same prices. All speak English. They know who the day's customers are.

The town itself is pretty crummy. Most of buildings are dilapidated, although the graffiti which adorned their cement sides was quite nice.

A huge skateboard ramp sat in the middle of the town. Litter was also rampant, but I wasn't really there for the scenery. Stuck in my mind is this one Christianite who looked like a Himalayan sherpa. He was stumbling around, cradling a bottle of rum, urinating in certain spots like an animal marking his territory.

Other vendors sold clothing, overpriced hemp necklaces, smoking paraphernalia, etc, and the food was superb. In the pizza line the guy in front of me asked the cook if he would include his bag of weed with a pie. “Yea, sure, but I'll charge ya' more.” “Nice.”

Looking back, I wished I had wandered around some more, checking out the school, nursery, and public hummus toilets. But I never made it too far, I never saw the point. The town looked like a metaphorical northern Dresden 1945, burned out by twenty-seven years of consistent pot blitzkrieg.

Hunter S. Thompson wrote it about Las Vegas, but change a few place names, and it could be about Christiania:

“History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of `history,' it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened...

“[T]hat was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave... you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Some things from the sixties were meant to stay there.