by Michael Kaeflein

“Hash!” hisses the man. This is Retiro park and it’s a lazy Sunday afternoon. I am nailed to the spot, wondering if I have heard right. “Hash!”, this time more urgently. Yes, this man is trying to sell me soft drugs in the middle of what is arguably Madrid’s most famous park. Talk about a downer, I came to the park to get away from it all, not to take part in shady drug dealings.

Hash or ‘chocolate’ as it is known in Madrid, is in my experience, as ubiquitous as the botellón and as popular as fútbol. Let´s cast a retrospective eye over my encounters with this substance in the past year and a half.

Upwards of sixty percent of the house parties that I have been to, of the lines outside concerts, bars and discos that I have stood in, have had the distinct smell of hash wafting over affairs. On countless occasions I have smelt hash in the streets, sometimes so strongly that I feel that I am back in Amsterdam! One of my flatmates has seen, on several occasions, people on their way to work having a sneaky joint, before they begin what is likely to be a surrealistic day of work.

One of the free daily newspapers reported a few years back that Spanish teenagers consider smoking hash less harmful than cigarettes. The Spanish authorities are trying to change imagine of hash as a ’soft drug’. Police in Barcelona last year began imposing 200 euro fines on people smoking hash and marijuana in the streets.
After countless visits to Retiro park I must have been propositioned by most of the hash dealers in Madrid. That’s quite honestly, why I now prefer to go to Casa de Campo!