| Hemp plant growing in front of a police station in Göttingen, Germany. |
Beautiful Göttingen, Germany has become a lot more beautiful over the last few weeks as hundreds of cannabis plants have begun sprouting in flower boxes, gardens and street sides all over the small college town.
No, the town isn’t a legal haven for cannabis – though Germans tend to be relatively tolerant about personal cannabis use. It’s a protest from the group “A Few Autonomous Flower Children” who say it’s high time Germany legalized cannabis outright.
The plants aren’t your usual smokable cannabis plants, either. To emphasize the plant’s harmlessness, the group planted industrial hemp plants with almost no THC.
| Göttingen, from Wikipedia.com |
“We can’t set eyes on this useful and beautiful plant because it’s absolutely forbidden in Germany to grow it,”AFAFG wrote in a letter claiming the mass-seeding. The group also encourages locals to take photos of the plants when they find them and post the pics to the web to get the word out — which is exactly how the photo of the hemp plant growing in front of the police station surfaced.
We here at Toke commend the project as a wonderful, peaceful and harmless protest. Unfortunately, the humorless German police don’t wear the same green-tinted glasses we wear.
The official response from law enforcement has been to tear out not just hemp plants – but any plant that looks like it mightbe hemp. They’ve also begun investigating the “crime”.
“This action is a big deal, people really put effort into it,” a police spokeswoman said. “Everywhere seeds could be sown, hemp plants are sprouting.
No word yet on the effects the eradication program have had on the city’s Japanese maple population.