Similar story, I was in Barcelona, and if you walk around the beach at night, you see dodgy-looking immigrants that will approach you and quietly ask if you want a cold beer.

See, it's illegal for stores to sell alcohol past a certain hour, so these guys provide a valuable service. However, I was with a friend who wanted to smoke some weed instead, so he went and asked one of the guys "do you have any weed?"

The guy looked horrified and quickly blurted out "No, no, only beer! You can't get that stuff!" before moving along.

It just struck me as funny that they would dodgily sell you illegal beer but that they would be righteously indignant at weed. "That, sir, is where I draw the line of illegality!"

I've been to Barcelona as well, the beer sellers are terrible human beings. They will hover around you like flies, then one of them will put a beer down next to you in the sand. When you refuse it, he'll pick up the beer and say "Look, it has sand all over it, it's ruined now. Pay me for it." They are of South Asian like myself, and I'm sure many Indian travelers make the mistake of talking to them when the best thing to do is completely ignore them.

The next night I was ambushed by four of them in the subway, they wanted to put their number in my phone and started getting really aggressive. I smacked the shit out of two of them before a bystander intervened. If I had handed my phone to them I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have gotten it back.

Haha! This happens at most places to tourists, some auto drivers, road side sellers in India try to rip off the tourists. It happened to me in Times Square when i first came to NYC. A guy was selling music CD's and when i was passing through him, he stopped me, handed over the CD, kinda forced me to buy which i didn't.

So across the world, it's very common the tourists get ripped off.

Maybe it's righteous indignation, or maybe they don't know your friend isn't an undercover cop.

Because alcohol laws don't tend to get enforced unless there's a problem, because most of Southern Europe operates on a "village and neighboring villages" field of view and it would be socially uncouth.

Weed on the other hand is very strictly enforced for the most part, except in more touristy and "Americanized" places.

Smoking weed in Spain is legal since a couple of decades. Selling a small bag is illegal, but this isn't really enforced as it's hard to prove that the bag was for selling and not for self consuming.

Usually police will turn a blind eye both for selling pot and selling beer, unless anything goes wrong and somebody complains.

Is the illegalization (made up a word) of weed in Europe at all a USA export as well? Or did they come to it on their own?

Hard to say. The history is murky and involve a whole mess of international conventions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_...

Seems to be the convention that brought cannabis into the fold.

An undercover cop could also bust them for selling beer.

All those guys, but all are selling drugs. Not only weed, in BCN it is easy to get weed semi-legally thanks to those clubs. Beer guys are in other-class-of-drugs business and if they did not sell to you it is because they did not trust in you. even police knows that but it is a controlled business. The government can't prevent drugs, instead they just observe them and keep them under control.

There are cannabis clubs all over Barcelona now, hard not to find.

When were you in Barcelona? It's easier to find weed than cigarettes and that's not even including the social smoking clubs popping up all over the city.

There is no way those guys didn't have weed or hashish. That's what those guys in Barcelona (and the Belearics) have.

Are you sure it wasn't a scam to rip you off? I'm born and raised in Tehran and numerous times I had gone out for dinner passed mid-night, and I simply walked into a restaurant, ordered the food, and ate (assuming the kitchen was still open).

Specially because people in Tehran prefer to have late supper compared to North Americans, it was a lot easier to find food options late at night than say in Toronto where past mid-night the only option is fast-foods.

The law has been in place for several years now. Definitely not a scam! If you're in Tehran you can check the place out.

Email me on (my username)@gmail.com and I'll give you more detailed address if you're interested.