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]

Of course, not all of Spain’s 1.1 children per fertile woman are smoking dope atop the rubble of the siglo de oro, but such behavior is an integral part of the social matrix within which the youth of Spain interpreted the mass murder of 3/11. The students absorbed the tragedy into the botellón: their Friday and Saturday evening routine of gathering in central Madrid’s plazas to drink liters of cheap wine mixed with Coca Cola (calimocho). These groups of students can range in number from