After police have proven unable to dissuade drug dealers from congregating in Berlin's Görlitzer Park, the manager of the park spray painted pink lines around designated areas for them to hang out and hawk their wares. The hope is that the dealers will no longer intimidate visitors throughout the park. From The Guardian:
"This method has purely practical reasoning behind it," (park manager Cengiz) Demirci told local radio station RBB. "It's not that we're legalising the selling of drugs."
Demirci said a much more effective solution would be if authorities gave the dealers work permits. The majority of them are asylum seekers who are not allowed to work while waiting for their claims to be processed. He added: "If they did that then 90% of them would stop what they're doing immediately."
Police chiefs criticised the move. "What is needed to ensure that the park is drug and crime free, is a constant police presence and judicial resolve," Benjamin Jendro from the Berlin branch of the police trade union GdP told Bild…
The sharpest remarks came from Germany's national anti-drugs tsar, Marlene Mortler, of the conservative Christian Social Union, who told the Funke Mediengruppe: "If this is true then it marks the capitulation of our constitutional state. We should not be issuing the dealers with a licence to deal."
