In the German Democratic Republic, getting a hold of narcotic drugs was exceptionally difficult. Like other consumer goods from abroad, the vast majority of citizens did not have access to the hard currency to purchase them. However, this did not mean that East Germany was free of the panic about drugs that existed in the West. The Socialist Unity Party (SED) saw narcotics as the product of a diseased capitalist society and were just as committed to prohibition as capitalist anti-drug warriors. Although exceptionally few smugglers sought to service the nearly non-existent East German market, the existence of West Berlin at the heart of the meant that it became a transit zone to the lucrative countercultural hotspot. The importance of chemical exports to the GDR economy combined with a genuine zeal for drug prohibition meant that the SED enthusiastically signed on to international narcotics regulation treaties and endorsed UN initiatives to combat illicit drugs globally. Anti-drug sentiment represented a commonality across the ideological divide of the Cold War because narcotics served as a repository for the fears of both capitalists and socialists alike.

Ned Richardson-Little is a Research Fellow in Department V: Globalizations in a Divided World at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History, Potsdam (ZZF). He was previously a Freigeist Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Erfurt leading the Volkswagen Stiftung-funded research group “The Other Global Germany: Deviant Globalization and Transnational Criminality in the 20th Century,” and is currently a PI of the VW Stiftung-funded project “Towards Illiberal Constitutionalism in East Central Europe: Historical Analysis in Comparative and Transnational Perspectives.”  He is the author of The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity and Revolution in East Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and The German Democratic Republic: The Rise and Fall of a Cold War State (Bloomsbury, 2025).