DANCING THE NIGHT AWAY AT A GERMAN MENTAL HOSPITAL
On the second Wednesday of every month, Klinikum Wahrendorff, a psychiatric hospital in Köthenwald, Germany, becomes the most improbable disco in the world. The common room is cleared out and transformed into something resembling a typical discotheque: People dress up, dance, drink, flirt, argue, and generally get out of hand. The main difference here is that while it’s hard to get in to a regular club, it’s even more difficult to get out of Wahrendorff.
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BOAR PIGLETS!
When VICE Germany sent us some footage of the Lehnitz animal asylum, we weren’t sure how cute it was going to be. Little did we know, boar piglets live there! These little rascals were found in the woods and love to eat, sleep, play, and hang out with their surrogate mom, who’s a dog.
Watch the film here
ARE YOU LOOKING TO ESCAPE FROM YOUR NEO-NAZI PAST?
EXIT Deutschland is an anti-Nazi organisation that helps people get out of the far-right game they’ve found themselves tangled up in and rehabilitate. Founded by former police detective Bernd Wagner and former neo-Nazi leader, Ingo Hasselbach, in many ways it’s similar to a witness protection programme – leaving a neo-Nazi cell or group is no picnic, and many people who make the decision to leave extremism live in fear of being attacked by the people they’re trying to leave behind.
Read about EXIT Deutschland here.
DO YOU WANT TO JOIN MY CANNABIS CLUB?
The liberal political party in Germany, “Die Linke”, is pushing to make marijuana legal as long as it’s been cultivated in so-called Cannabis Social Clubs (CSCs). Under the proposed legalisation, people could become members of a CSC club and take a gram of marijuana home with them each day. Furthermore, motorists who are caught with THC coursing happily through their bloodstreams would not lose their licenses as easily. Similar legislation is already in place in Spain and Belgium, and unsurprisingly crusties and amateur stoners alike are attending such clubs in scores.
Since 2002, Georg Wurth has been the spokesman, director and owner of the German Hemp Collective. In 1996, he was charged with possession of four grams of marijuana, and so took it upon himself to get the ball rolling on the legalisation debate. To his misfortune (or fortune?), his charge brought him to the highest place possible, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court, but it’s his 2010 petition, titled “Cannabis Consumer Decriminilisation”, that has played a major role in getting Die Linke to take these proposals to parliament.
I spoke to Georg the day before Die Link put the proposals he helped shape to parliament.
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