Anyway, I've spent all afternoon watching this vote actually happen and writing about it, and then talking about it.
It's huge, the progress in Canada and to a lesser extent the US has been amazing, but always so distant. To have such sweeping reform on our geographical doorstep is huge.
Whats interesting is that the one thing that stopped Germany going further, ie full legalisation with a commercial dispensary style operation is the EU. Germany aren't giving up and hope to work with the EU to change things, but the laws that govern national production and distribution are set by the EU, where as how to deal with personal level legislation in set by the member state, which is how we got here. Equally, legalising commercial cannabis creates problems with Schengen, EU states can't refuse goods from another state, so it gets messy. France for example can't technically say no to exported weed from Germany under Schengen even though cannabis is illegal.
Germany isn't the first in Europe, Malta, Luxembourg and Switzerland have already done similar moves, and the Netherlands are trialing legal supply to coffee shops (its always been technically illegal but just ignored), but a country of Germanys size, economically, geographically and politically, is significant. I can see the EU making some big changes to drug laws soon, and then the dominoes will fall.
