When it comes to the explorations, first and foremost the big issues are: climate protection, social justice, financial and tax policy. Here it is important to stand firm, to negotiate hard, this is where the much-quoted “red lines” are drawn. Who pays for clean air? Is the speed limit coming? And what about the taxes? There is still little agreement among the SPD, Greens and FDP about this – at least what has been known from the talks so far. It is therefore not inconvenient for those willing to go to government to come across a rather small, but no less heatedly debated topic, on which the three are moving towards a compromise: the legal distribution of cannabis.
The insight that the previous use of cannabis, which consisted primarily of prohibitions and criminalization, has not been able to reduce consumption. And that the prosecution swallows up enormous resources in the judiciary and the police, that a new path must fundamentally be taken, all of this can be found in the election manifestos of the traffic light explorers. It becomes more difficult when it comes to the question of what exactly should change in drug policy. The Greens and FDP advocate legalizing cannabis and “licensed specialty stores” where adults can buy weed. On the other hand, the efforts of the SPD seem rather hesitant: With model projects, a regulated dispensing of cannabis should first be “tested”, it says in the election program.
On Wednesday, at least for a short time, it appeared that there was now agreement between the three parties on the subject of drug policy: SPD health expert Karl Lauterbach, who has long strictly rejected the legalization of cannabis, spoke to the Rheinische Post Surprisingly in favor of including this in a possible coalition agreement. The reason for the change of heart is a new phenomenon in the drug scene: “We have recently had the problem that cannabis is contaminated on the market and that cannabis dealers are trying to make users dependent on harder drugs,” he said Süddeutsche Zeitung.
A quick and big reform sounds different
So a small interim success for the traffic light explorers? It doesn’t seem that simple. On the one hand, the topic of cannabis has not even made it onto the negotiating table, according to Lauterbach. On the other hand, the health expert is also backtracking a bit when it comes to the practical implementation of legalization: In his opinion, cannabis should initially only be sold legally in model regions. A sale in stores, as the Greens and the FDP are calling for, would be “okay”, but initially only in certain regions and scientifically supported. In the long term, says Lauterbach, we have to come to decriminalization. A quick and big reform sounds different.
So the topic should not be fully discussed yet. The Young Liberals also made this clear: their federal chairman Jens Teutrine wrote on Twitter that cannabis legalization was “an overdue matter of course. Stigmatization, prohibition and criminalization have failed”. Somebody else reacted with little enthusiasm: the Ministry of Health. A spokesman for Jens Spahn immediately rejected the matter. The traffic light explorers shouldn’t care much about that at the moment.