A Famous Hippie Freetown Is Ganging Up on Drug Criminals

COPENHAGEN—For 50 years, Christiania, an anarchic, free-spirited commune in Denmark’s capital, has gained global fame for its open-air cannabis market, attracting visitors from across the world, along with hardened criminals and regular police crackdowns.

Now a group of residents has risen up against the gangs that have taken control of the trade, in a risky, clandestine operation aimed at shutting down the famed Pusher Street.

In recent years, organized criminals have pushed out most of Christiania’s residents from the lucrative cannabis trade, souring one of Northern Europe’s biggest tourist attractions and a symbol of Danish tolerance.

After a spate of increasingly violent incidents, including several killings, many residents have had enough. Before dawn on Tuesday, about 50 Christianites—as residents of the commune are called—gathered in the dead of night to watch the cranes they ordered use shipping containers and concrete walls to block off entrances into Pusher Street, hours before drug dealers would arrive to begin the day’s business.

“This action is taken in the hope of freeing Christiania from the tyranny of gangs and hard-core criminals,” the activists said, adding that they did so at great risk to their own safety. “We are ordinary people who have to go to work and pack lunchboxes for our children. The gangs are ready to use violence and kill people in order to protect their income and territories.”

The showdown between residents and drug dealers in Christiania is a consequence of a Danish, and European, drug market that is growing larger and more violent. It also marks a turning point for one of Europe’s most radical and enduring social experiments, which has survived at odds with the law since its founding in 1971, when a band of hippies occupied an abandoned military barrack and established an anticapitalist haven based on self-governance, free thinking and legalized cannabis.

“We need a moment of truth,” a resident involved in Tuesday’s operation said. “We have gone from being a role model of green energy, art, culture and LGBTQ rights to spending all our community meetings discussing violent episodes in Pusher Street.”

Christiania’s early cannabis trade was driven by hippies transporting drugs from Asia to Copenhagen in beat-up Volkswagen vans. Today, about $150 million worth of cannabis flows each year through roughly 30 plywood stalls crammed into the 100-meter cobble-stoned pedestrian strip that is Pusher Street. It comprises about two-thirds of Denmark’s total cannabis economy, according to Kim Møller, associate professor of criminology at Malmö University in Sweden and expert on Christiania, though he added that no one knows the exact size of the business.

The cannabis market is booming across the continent. In 2021, European authorities seized nearly 1,100 metric tons of cannabis resin and herbal cannabis—the highest level in a decade—according to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, mirroring a rise in the trade of other, more dangerous, narcotics, notably cocaine. Over the past decade, the potency of seized cannabis in Europe has also increased significantly, according to the EMCDDA, and with it the potential harm of long-term addiction.

The growing scale of the trade sits at odds with how life used to be in Christiana. The neighborhood of about 850 residents is laid out on 34 hectares of some of the most coveted real estate in the Danish capital, less than a mile from the parliament building. Cars are banned in the commune, whose colorful, quirky houses, horse stables and vegetarian restaurants are dotted around large lakes surrounded by lush green vegetation.

Fleur Frilund, a 27-year-old copywriting student, moved into Christiania about six years ago, attracted to its proximity to nature and embrace of artists, freethinkers and old virtues such as craftsmanship, as many people built and renovated their own homes.

“It’s a radically different way of living, compared to the big-city mentality just on the other side of the fence,” she said in an interview in her third-floor apartment, which previously belonged to a navy colonel.

It is this lifestyle that residents say they are trying to salvage.

On Sunday, two days before the operation, about a dozen activists met in a private home, behind drawn curtains, to complete their battle plan. Over coffee, the atmosphere was tense. Nobody touched the spread of hummus and freshly baked buns.

A middle-aged man’s hands were visibly shaking. Many worried about retaliation from drug dealers in the days following the operation. One activist had sent his wife and children away for the week. In case of a confrontation during the operation, they agreed to only call the police if weapons appeared. One young activist proposed bringing along fire extinguishers in case the drug dealers set dogs on them. 

In the end, the predawn operation ensured that no drug dealers confronted the activists—young and old, men and women—as they moved around Christiania, guiding the shipping containers into place in the dark. While younger participants trashed cannabis stalls, middle-age residents spray-painted the containers: “Pusher Street is closed.”

“Christianites have not turned against free cannabis,” an activist said. “But Pusher Street doesn’t help the cause for free hash in any way. It’s a worst-case scenario of what free cannabis can lead to.”

Despite its anarchic origins, Christiania has maintained its own rules that banned cars, hard drugs, motorcycle gang insignia and bulletproof vests. In Pusher Street, photography is prohibited, as is running, so the drug dealers can tell when a police raid is under way.

Evicting residents from Christiania is nearly impossible. Some 40 to 50 residents are actively involved in the cannabis trade, according to Copenhagen police, and like other Christianites they have the right to veto any major decisions proposed in community meetings, and have protected Pusher Street.

Over the years, government pressure has forced Christiania to gradually relinquish some of its autonomy. In 2011, after seven years of failed negotiations with the state, residents agreed to purchase the land they lived on, formally legalizing their status as landowners. Unanimously refusing to buy property individually, they instead purchased it collectively through a fund for about $12 million, raising some of it through the sale of shares to the public.

“We are proof that poor people are also able to live in the center of the city,” said Emmerik Warburg, 70, who has lived in Christiania since 1974.

For decades, however, police raids have targeted Pusher Street, resulting in numerous deaths of residents and dealers. As the violence accompanying the trade worsened, police have continued to raid Pusher Street several times a week, often with brute force, only to see stalls re-erected and hidden hash re-emerge from hiding places as soon as they leave.

With criminal groups repeatedly clashing over Pusher Street, the freetown has become a battleground for Denmark’s largest organized gangs. An influx of young outsiders has gradually pried control of the drug market from Christiania’s own dealers.

Some gang members openly use hard drugs, carry weapons and employ minors, all of which contravene the commune’s rules.

When a young man by a stall was shot and killed last year, following the killing of a young resident the year before, many were rattled.

“As long as we had our friends down there, we could keep up,” Warburg, who works for Christiania’s self-governing administration, said about Pusher Street. “They violate the moral code of Christiania.”

Authorities and Christiania accuse each other of not doing enough to restore order, but have recently reached a rare agreement to potentially cooperate. At a meeting in June, residents agreed with the police, Justice Ministry and the city of Copenhagen—authorities that the group has been at loggerheads with for five decades—to set out an agreement to eventually clear Pusher Street.

“The violence and crime around Pusher Street have reached a level that we neither can nor want to accept,” said Lord Mayor of Copenhagen Sophie Hæstorp Andersen.

The activists didn’t harbor illusions that Tuesday’s action would permanently close down Pusher Street, but said they hoped it would serve as an invitation to the police and politicians to get serious about trying—even if it means the drug trade moves to other parts of Copenhagen, bringing violence in its wake. “It’s a classic drug-crime dilemma: violence versus consumption,” said Møller, the criminologist. “You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at [email protected]