One evening in 1983, a pair of local police officers in the German city of Siegburg stopped by an old butcher shop to investigate reports of suspicious activity. Inside, they found three slightly scruffy twentysomethings with kilos of contraband. Bernd Drosihn, the ringleader, tried to object, but the officers confiscated the offending substances. After a stern reprimand, they handed over a letter announcing a preliminary investigation into the crime: making “Torfu.” “Every week, we received a new prohibition order from every possible part of the country. The bureaucrats kept at…
