I don’t remember having smelled so much hashish in the streets of Madrid on my last research trip here three years ago. This time it seems that there are few sixteen- to twenty-year-olds on the street who are not either rolling or smoking a joint. I happen to live in one of the better neighborhoods of central Madrid, less than a kilometer from Atocha Station, and about five minutes’ leisurely walk from Lope de Vega’s house, the Royal Academy of History, and the convent in which Cervantes is interred. And all of these sites are perfumed by the less than pious odor of the teens’ oily Moroccan weed, usually in full view of the municipal police. That these stoned adolescents are in many ways the principal actors in the political life of today’s Spain was one of the many truths that emerged in the days following the March 11 catastrophe that, as of this writing, has claimed 192 lives.[1]

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