The fine distinction between law and justice

A comment on the raids against the Cannameleon and other CBD shops

Brief explanation: At the beginning of the year, Cannameleon opened in Würzburg, a shop for the sale of CBD products. Following a successful opening, another store followed in Würzburg and additionally in Schweinfurt. CBD stands for cannabidiol and is a substance that, amongst other things, has anti-inflammatory and anti-spasmodic effects. Medical research has only been intensively studying substances from the cannabis plant for a few years, and to get ahead of it: No, cannabidiol is not the substance that gets the user high. That is THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) and is also contained in the cannabis plant. Depending on how the plant is cultivated, the flowers contain more of one substance or the other. If you have never dealt with drugs other than alcohol, nicotine and caffeine: Imagine absinthe, the drink to which hallucinogenic effects are attributed. When the police raided the shops and also some private residences of the owners and employees of Cannameleon with brutal methods a few weeks ago, they did so not because their absinthe contained legal alcohol, but because it contained too much of the illegal thujone, which gives absinthe the nickname 'Green Fairy'. Basically, no sensible absinthe can be made without some thujone. The same applies to cannabis flowers, whose effect can be healing and medicinal – which is why Cannameleon also sells them – but which also always come with a slight high (CBD tea may be sold with a THC content of 0.2%, one of the public prosecutor's accusations is that tea with a THC content of 0.3% was found). 

And now it is about this little bit of a high: It has long been known that even the highly prohibited substance THC is hardly as dangerous as alcohol, which alone kills 74,000 people every year in Germany (that is almost one in every thousand German citizen). THC makes you tired and unmotivated, but in no way can it be as deadly as 2 bottles of whisky in one go before the next Aldi. But this tedious discussion shall not be continued here. But why are shops and private residences being raided nationwide (in addition to Cannameleon, CBD shops in other German cities were also searched) with the accusation of selling to minors, when according to this accusation thousands of beverage stores should be raided much sooner? This case made me suspicious. As a white student of the middle class, I have never experienced the arbitrariness of this constitutional state, but now are respectable citizens here in Würzburg supposed to experience grossly exaggerated reprisals for minor violations? This is probably about more than just the law, according to which the police act: it is about the gap that stands between existing law and justice. But what is that anyway?

Law: These are fixed rules according to which we all want to get along together. The most important function of law is the securing of inner peace. Classic example: If my neighbour's tree extends too far into my property, I should not go over there, hit him over the head and fell the tree, but rather search for a solution with my neighbour. If we both cannot find one, a neutral third party should find the solution. 

Justice: That is what (at least in theory) everyone acts according to: I find it just to hit my neighbour over the head if he will not trim the tree, my neighbour finds it just that I go to prison for it. In short: Justice is difficult because there is not ONE justice, but rather everyone has their own sense for it. Everyone was raised by different parents and has different values. That is why one should not speak of THE justice, but of JUSTICES. In the modern, liberal state, the most diverse values are considered in order to distil from them a standardised, universally valid overall law. It is, so to speak, a Gaussian bell curve that is taken and the peak is established as 'normal' law.

But there is a problem here: when the majority agrees on a right, there are always a few who do not agree with it. However, they also get hit with the hammer of the law. According to Plato, the state takes on the role of educator and if you do not comply, you end up in the quiet corner, called prison. But we are already 2000 years further on from Plato. Today we no longer assume that we want to educate every adult and, especially in Germany, the concept of education has had a more difficult trajectory since the Nazis and the GDR. 

And yet we must be able to agree on something general, since we cannot reopen every small neighbourhood dispute individually. But does this universally valid law really have to be applied in every single case? Even when it is obviously not consistent with justice? The raids on Cannameleon could be lawful, after all, because those involved would be treated equally before the law. The drinks shop owner could also be put in handcuffs. But they simply will not be – there have been no nationwide raids so far for selling alcohol to minors. And here Plato comes back into play. He summarised many statements of his students under justice. However, he himself had only this to say about it: Justice is what is appropriate to the nature of the thing. 

And raiding several young entrepreneurs who seem to care more about the health of their customers than the petrol station operator who sells 15-year-old Jackie cola cans to, hardly seems appropriate, let alone just or even 'merely' lawful. Yes, the police's approach already allows for Günther Jakobs' concept of enemy criminal law. General civil rights are denied when the person acts as an incorrigible ideological offender deliberately against the constitution of the state. And since here in the middle of Bavaria, the heartland of beer, a few neo-hippies want to advance the establishment of a new health-oriented plant, the state must act against these ideological offenders. The terror experienced by the few who do not sit at the top of the Gaussian bell curve is the price for systemic justice, which attempts to bring all individual justices under one roof. However, this leads to the law not protecting social peace, but rather the law of the law. It becomes an end in itself. 

But we are all partly responsible for that ourselves: whoever expects justice ends up with only the rule of law!

Franziskus Landner