Opera house encourages audience to smoke pot

A Berlin opera house is encouraging audience members to smoke cannabis joints during its latest production. The Neuköllner Opera House says it wants to enhance the psychedelic experience of Camille Saint-Saens' drug opera The Oriental Princess. The actors themselves will also smoke pot onstage while the audience mellow out in the stalls, reports DW-Worldl. Artistic director Bernhard Glocksin maintains that the opera experience will be "improved with a few joints" while the opera house asserts that artistic license will protect it from drug laws. "It's a test to see just what we can get away with," Glocksin said. In Berlin, possession of anything up to 10 grams of cannabis is considered to be "for personal use" and is often overlooked. But smoking it in public places can be interpreted by law as an offence against the German constitution.