East Germany passes a Narcotic Drugs Act

East Germany passed a law against cannabis in 1973 although almost none of its citizens had ever seen any. The law was about the border.

A country without hashish

“Hashish in the GDR,” one East German recalled, “was as hard to get your hands on as explosives.” The state credited socialism. The real protection was the currency: smugglers had no interest in being paid in East German marks, so there was nothing to gain by selling there.

The party nonetheless treated cannabis as a threat. From the early 1950s the press presented it as proof of the decay of capitalism, in language close to American anti-marijuana films of the 1930s.

The transit problem

West Berlin lay inside East German territory, and by the late 1960s it had a drug scene. The routes to it crossed the GDR.

In 1968 one person was caught bringing hashish into East Germany. In 1970 there were 328 seizures, 142 kilograms in all, nearly all of it hashish bound for West Berlin. Agreements in 1971 and 1972 opened transit roads and made the traffic easier. Much of the organised smuggling ran through Schönefeld airport, where the state airline flew in from the Levant. Couriers with a few grams were fined; organised smugglers with 5 to 20 kilograms got one to nine years.

The law

Until then the only drug law was the 1929 Opium Law, which the Soviet occupation authority had reinstated in 1945. In 1973 the People’s Chamber passed the Narcotic Drugs Act.

• Producing, trafficking and consuming cannabis became crimes, along with every narcotic in the UN conventions.
• A Central Bureau for Addictive Substances was set up in the health ministry.
• The few addicts in the country were to be registered and could be confined.

East Germany joined the UN conventions in 1975. With almost no domestic cases to study, its experts took their science from the West, including the theory of cannabis as a gateway to heroin.

The end

The Stasi folded drugs into its view of the border, linking hashish smugglers with people who helped East Germans escape. When the Wall opened in November 1989, cannabis arrived with everything else, and in early 1990 the interim government admitted that drug imports had become a public health problem it had not prepared for. East Berlin police created a narcotics working group that year.

The index records the 1973 Act for Germany as context for the East; the national score follows West German law.^[1]