For the past month, I've had this interest in the German drug landscape. It started with some reality show in November where cops laid out the folks they were busting, and this 'little' war that was now existing in urbanized Germany.
While the number of Germans is often discussed as a national population of 82-million (to include Germans and visa-holding 'others')....between the ages of 15 and 64, there are only 54-million residents in Germany. The other folks....under age 15, or over the age of 64....are not what you'd consider in the prime of life or active in drug-circles.
I went to the EU Center on drug usage to look over the practical numbers in this discussion. They probably get their data from the German government, and you'd have to assume it's somewhat reliable. And at least this was somewhat current (2018).
For active weed use, in the age group of 15 to 34 years old....around 13-percent will admit that they use it. Guys more than gals, if you were curious.
Cocaine usage? They put the number at 1.2-percent of the population.
Would urbanization versus ruralization make any difference? I would suggest that but there's really no PhD type survey or analysis to prove that point. My thoughts are that if you live in some remote valley in Bavaria....it's probably fewer than 2-percent of the locals who'd smoke a joint occasionally. While if you live in some downtown area of Frankfurt, it's probably closer to 40-percent of the local population smoking weed.
But then I came to this one statistic....the EU folks suggest that around 150,000 Germans are opioid-users (to include heroin use as well). That number might have been a lot lower twenty years ago. Things have changed in the past decade or two.
It only takes a two minute walk out of the Frankfurt train station to reach Taunus Strasse, and to find forty folks laying there on the sidewalk or 'resting' after their 8AM 'hit'. If you made a big walk around the whole railway section of town, there's probably more than four-hundred folks doing this daily. Most all urbanized areas of Germany have achieved a opioid or heroin zone. I'm amazed that no one has invented a term for the neighborhood, or put up signs to let you know about the neighborhood.
On par with most of Europe? I would suggest that. To some degree, it's certainly not like the situation you'd find in Baltimore, or Detroit. But it's developed into something that older Germans just shake their head over because they don't remember this type of thing existing in the 1980s.
So I caveat this essay. I'm not writing some heap of criticism to suggest Germany has gone off the deep end or reflects some image of Baltimore. In fact, I can note dozens of smaller cities where there's just not much of a drug problem existing. You can still grow up as a kid, in some German town where you never encounter a single opioid-heroin user in your entire life. Or you could grow up in the shadow of Frankfurt or Hamburg, and see forty-odd users per day. It's just the way that urbanization has occurred and what it's 'dumped' upon society.
One might even go and suggest that on the list of 500 'big' problems that the typical Germans would list....removing the users or their zone....might only pop up with folks who live in urban zones, and the folks in more rural regions wouldn't even put it on their top 1,000 problems to solve.
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