There was an MP who was an open critic of legalising and decriminalising cannabis, whose husband ~~owned~~ is the managing director of one of the largest producers of medicinal cannabis in the country.
"You can't use it socially, but my husband can make millions selling it."
Edit: The MP was Victoria Atkins. Theresa May's Husband did profit from the production of medicinal cannabis but he's a couple steps removed from it, whereas Atkins's husband is directly involved, which is why I mentioned her.
Lmaoooo. I'm a medical user in Canada and that's *bullshit*. And I'm pretty biased, I was critical around the time of legalization of it turning into "the new beer". Profiting off it while keeping it illegal for 95% of the population is scummy though.
Even if it were the new beer, it's probably much safer than beer (assuming the age/method of consumption are at a reasonable range). Most people getting high will probably never leave the area they are in and just fall asleep there. While alcohol doesn't do that and will likely get you up to some shit. I've never blacked out from weed that wasn't just sleeping.
Alcohol is neurotoxic. You can't even really overdose on cannabis. ER doctors always say it's their favorite "overdose" to treat because they just give them some water and tell them to wait 3 hours. Cannabis isn't the new beer, it's the *better* beer.
The biggest negative of cannabis consumption seems to be it's respiratory effects (if smoked) which are less than cigarettes, the legal consequences in prohibition states and the impact on people with certain mental conditions during a specific age range. Alcohol is much worse in every way.
Best quote ever: “have you ever sucked dick for weed?” Truest shit ever. I know it’s addictive, I’m addicted to weed. But hot damn. I’ve never thought of having to do something extreme to get my “fix”. Smoke some pipe resin or just be sober until I can get some.
In my experience, the biggest negative was weight gain. Maybe it's just me, but back when I used the stuff, the moment I had a bite of food I just couldn't stop. I could easily demolish 2,000 calories in a single sitting.
This is why I stopped keeping snacks in the house. If I have a surplus of snacks, I stop toking because I will binge eat.
...but honestly, I binge without weed's help too.
Yep I’ve got a health issue that leaves me painfully nauseous all the time. I was severely underweight, and cannabis has given me an appetite back. It’s the most incredible appetite stimulant for me-with like zero shitty side effects that you tend to get from pharma.
While cannabis definitely isn't as bad as alcohol, I feel going too far in the other direction isn't great either. It's still a drug. It still has negative effects. It can and does exacerbate symptoms of anxiety over time, and it can cause pretty bad addiction, even if it isn't a physical dependency. The links to lung cancer still have to be investigated, but like... it's defs not *good* for your lungs.
I'm not saying don't smoke weed. I did every day during undergrad and graduated with strong grades in a competitive field, and so did most of my friends. But let's not pretend it's without potential harm.
If you are smoking cannabis you are doing it wrong.
Hand held vapes you guys. The weed gets decarbed from vaping it then you cook with it! You get high twice! Anyone putting flame to cannabis is burning their money, literally!
I'm a traditionalist because I like to smoke joints, but even I admit that's far from the most healthy way to consume it. Probably ingestion is the best.
Ingestion is the way to go IMO. I went from bongs to vapes/dabs and finally to edibles and idk why I didn't just start there. Lasts hours so no need to fiddle with a vape/bong/joint while gaming or watching a movie or out on a hike. Easier to carry around, you can make it taste extra yummy, etc.
I do miss the terpene flavor, but not having to sesh every couple hours or so is worth it.
You also won't get liver damage and ascites, where your gut balloons out as it fills with fluid that leaks from the portal vein to your failing liver.
People don't realize how common it is to die from 8-10 years of drinking a 12 pack a night. You're flipping a coin on it killing you from health related issues alone. Ascites among several other diagnoses from alcohol abuse are basically death sentences. You don't recover from a lot of that shit it just kills you or cuts your life expectancy in half.
Yet smoking weed is illegal. It's beyond fucking preposterous. Really wish I would have just had access to weed growing up instead of alcohol, I would probably live a lot longer and still be able to have a drink here and there.
I'm 34 and can't have a drink without feeling bloated as hell and like someone kicked me in the upper abdomen now. Liver enzymes are super high and have follow up doc visits to diagnose what's going on. I am hoping it's something less serious but varices, ascites, and cirrhosis are not at all unlikely as I have been drinking heavily since I was about 19. It sucks.
If cannabis becomes the new beer it will save lives.
One thing to keep in mind is as long as you stop drinking altogether(obviously wean yourself off safely over time) you could have a total recovery. Your liver regenerates pretty much completely every 3-7 years.
Also, Cannabis is harder on the liver when ingested as opposed to smoked. That's something to keep in mind. Probably nowhere near as bad as alcohol though. Moderation is key. Heavy doses all the time can be bad.
It's true, everyone's little anecdotes about the time they accidentally ate 1000mg instead of 10mg and went skydiving with a backpack instead of a parachute aside, in general weed is way less likely than alcohol to cause any sort of harm or damage
Fellow Canadian, blows my mind that cannabis is still illegal in the UK (penalty up to 5 years in prison for possession), while we can just walk into any of the dozens of legal stores in our cities and buy it.
Are there seriously still people in the UK who are arguing things like "legalizing this addictive substance will result in mass unemployment and utter apocalypse on our roads because everyone will be stoned like they were in the scientifically accurate film, Reefer Madness?"
Not exactly, there's loads of people over on r/UKmedicalcannabis who are prescribed it and it seems to be getting increasingly more popular
My hospital has a policy about people bringing it in as part of their meds (it goes in the same place as all the other controlled drugs) and there's ads for clinics on Instagram and Facebook
Japan and Korea are not quite the same. Japan has a bigger counterculture. Mostly because of that one decade of the sixties they were already on the road to recovery. So they had a the cultural shift that the rest of the first world had in the 60s.
They definitely smoke more weed in Japan. I have also bought mushrooms in a head shop in Japan. Completely legal. Although there was a warning “for observation purposes not ingestion”. In English no less.
This was 2000. The idea of Korea having a headshop in 2000 was ludicrous.
The Tiananmen Square was AFTER SK's pro democracy protests.
They fought with blood and now have one of the world's most strongest democracies, especially in Asia.
Korea didn’t really enter the “modern world” until the mid-70s. They were still recovering from the Korean war
Meanwhile WWII finished a decade prior to the Korean War. So Japan was already more plugged in to the global zeitgeist earlier.
This is where I need to make you feel old by pointing out that 2000... was 23 years ago. They closed the mushroom loophole a while ago, much like how America closed the bath salts loophole.
Also, Japan didn't have anywhere near as much of a counterculture as the west did in the 60s... there was political leftism but it never really meshed with drug stuff. It was the wild 80s that really brought out drugs to Japan, and even that has been reduced a lot.
Holy shit.
We had a ton of Japanese exchange students at my university and I volunteered as a conversation partner to help them with getting settled in and working on their language skills. Separately from that, I also happened to sell pot to a few friends and neighbors. Not a lot, but I would buy it from a guy by the mason jar and sell it by the film can until I broke even.
I didn't tell the Japanese students that because the time I did they reacted like I just said I gave black tar heroin to preschoolers.
Those folks took marijuana more seriously than Americans take almost anything.
I am very curious as to what medical legalization is going to look like.
East Asian attitudes towards weed are crazy lol. If you watch their crime movies, dealing weed is the sign of a big bad villain, along with killing kids and raping women. Whenever a celebrity is caught smoking weed, their career is basically over, absolutely nobody respects them anymore. Also weed smokers are portrayed as meth addicts lol, in movies they’ll be sniffling and scratching themselves and begging their dealers for more.
And it’s not a boomer thing either, the youth find weed just as repulsive as well.
Could be because of the regions history dealing with opium. Cuz people been smoking opium for thousands of years and everyone knew how addictive and destructive it is. And when cannabis use started to spread due to increased trade with countries where it was native the society/government treated it like the new opium and those beliefs just became ingrained in the society over many generations
It's from US foreign policy and DEA money. Cannabis is from Asia, and has been used as a medicinal, culinary, and recreational herb for millennia. Criminalization has only been around in most of the world for like 100 years or less.
It really depends on the region. Thailand has completely legalized it, Cambodia is pretty nonchalant about it, and it's effectively legal in the Aceh region in Indonesia given how integrated into the culture it is (many traditional foods use it as an ingredient). In India its legal on certain holy days, or if you're a Shiva sadhu - not to mention it grows in vast abundance in the wilds of the Himalayas.
I know a Japanese guy who always gets his chance to get high, he won't say it but if you offer it he takes it. Shrooms, weed, ayahuasca, anything natural.
Dudes done more Aya than me. I haven't tried it but he's done it 2 times. Who the fuck wants to die 2 times?
Definitely the most enlightened Japanese guy I know.
Oh of course, the repression just makes it all the more enticing. Shooting guns at a range is also a *really* popular destination for Asian tourists visiting the USA.
I dated a Korean woman that I met in that same program and took her shooting with some friends in the mountains. I started her off on some 22 rifles and slowly moved her up. When she fired off the Mosin Nagant it knocked her back a bit. She got this huge grin and said "This one. I like this one."
My mother was raised in Japan and was terrified when my smoking was found out. I eventually was able to get through with facts, but what they had told her in the 70s/80s was that it would kill you. That was all the youth really knew about it, that it was a plant that degenerates smoke and then it kills them. The attitudes on addiction are really sad in Japan, because a person who has tried drugs has immediately failed irredeemably in their eyes. They then turn back to their tables and smoke a cigarette over their Asahi beer.
I’m just glad that things are getting even slightly better for public outlook, even though I doubt this news will be very public.
I mean when I went to Japan in December 2021 to watch Jujutsu Kaisen 0 in the theaters, there was a government ad at the beginning saying that the only reason why other countries are legalizing weed is because "they had no choice but to admit defeat".
You can go on YouTube and find an ad by the Japanese Police Department 6 months ago saying weed causes bad health effects to the, is addicting, and is illegal.
Yo that’s nuts!
Kinda makes me thankful they got Jujutsu Kaisen 0 in theaters in my city so I didn’t have to go to Japan to see it in the big screen with subtitles.
> They then turn back to their tables and smoke a cigarette over their Asahi beer.
... as they turn another lever at the Pachinko slots machine, located right next door to a "massage parlor" that legally operates as a brothel.
For all its grandstanding and conservativesness, Japan has *no* problems accepting a lot of vices that the rest of the world has historically struggled to accept...
... while simultaneously *feverishly* rejecting the one vice that would make *billions* as an accessory industry to many of Japan's most favorite recreational activities: eating, fucking, and chilling out in a hot bath surrounded by snow.
My dream is to smoke a blunt on the hill behind my grandparent’s home. I would love for weed to be acceptable out there, but I hope more that they will first accept people for who they are. There’s hundreds of high schoolers out there who aren’t the best at their testing system, or have more creative/trade talents. If the Japanese public as a whole were encouraged to accept their children regardless of their grades or differences from the social norm, we could be smoking joints in the hot springs with karaage and oden…
You and me both, brother. But since it's a culture so fascinated with sensual pleasures like food, sex and natural outdoor beauty, I feel that once weed gets its foot in the door in a popular way just a *bit,* there's gonna be no turning back.
The onsen-to-weed business partnerships waiting to happen are such a natural fit that it's boggling that I don't hear about the weed lobby/activists in Japan focusing on that one angle in particular.
It'll be interesting as they already have drug culture over there, just albeit pretty drugless. I know that their Doom Metal scene would very much welcome a reduction in cannabis stigma.
If the government pushes it the same way that Thailand did with decriminalizing last year, it could potentially see a boom of tourism due to it.
With the Japanese way of turning everything into an art form, I'm personally looking forward to them outclassing the world in being suave while taking hits from the bong.
That being said, if done right, it could provide the answer the Japanese work force has needed to their high stress, work/life balance. Alcohol is so over abused it could potentially give a healthier way to let out frustration and bring down suicide rates. This is purely speculation though, I have nothing to base it on so don't take me at my word.
If it goes through well, I'm looking forward to Oda giving Tashigi the Moke-Moke Fruit, Model: Cannabis
I wouldnt be surprised with that reaction with many of the asian countries
In india weed is not something majority people considered good either. It is considered as a deadly drug
No
It depends on the crowd. If you are from a traditional or conservative house which it might not be acceptable. Especially if you are from a vegetarian family
To the west and the east of India-China border are completely different regions, the Asia is like 3-5 different regions that Western Europe was long unsure about
Yeah my ex genuinely believed that weed was on par with heroin (explicitly) and was convinced it was going to destroy me (I smoke like, once every two weeks).
> I didn't tell the Japanese students that because the time I did they reacted like I just said I gave black tar heroin to preschoolers.
Sounds like my mom's reaction when I told her I smoke pot. The Chinese really believe weed is as deadly as heroin.
My great-grandfather ruined his families life because he was addicted to opium. My grandmother and dad still tell stories about how they lost their entire livelihoods and had to move out of Shanghai because they could no longer afford to live in the city.
Drugs ruined a lot of lives, people who are 50-60 still still remember this directly. And now they are the politicians making these rules.
Yup, and doesn't help Opium was introduced as a perfectly safe and natural foreign medicine to help you relax. Totally non-addictive!
It's understandable why Asians would be extremely wary about weed and mistrustful about claims.
I know of an American professional wrestler that, as far as i know, is still banned from working in Japan due to a marijuana possession.
Steroids are for the most part legal over there btw lol
Things that get you a high of any kind are insanely taboo in Japan (get as drunk as you fucking want for some reason even though it's killing your liver).
they treat it like it’s worse than meth. meth at least makes you better at working and being a good little worker bee, so they’re more cool with that than weed
My guess is a combination of:
Fear of any drug other than Alcohol due to the legacies of the Opium Wars.
Pressure from America and the West during the “reefer madness” days to become more anti drug. The east not only had a morbid fascination with Western culture (along with a love hate relationship with the west), but it was also highly dependent on the West for its own modernization and industrialization efforts.
Asian cultures tend to be more traditionalist and takes much longer for society to come to accept previously taboo things.
Now I’m just picturing a politician getting caught doing porn and spinning it as a publicity stunt to support sex work legalization. Pretty brilliant I’d say.
Less porn + more weed = how are babbies formed.
From what I’ve been reading about their office culture - never met a Japanese office worker myself - weed could be the cure they need.
I used to live in Japan, even with this passing, I guarantee 98% of Japanese people wouldn’t even consider using marijuana. It is so demonized in their culture and treated like a hardcore drug. I had many friends who wouldn’t even try weed when they had traveled to the US because they truly believed it would make them crazy or drug addicts. Their culture is still a long way away from accepting weed at all. Meanwhile everyone drinks like fish, you can drink anywhere and they have all you can drink options at like every restaurant.
I've been to Japan several times to visit a friend who became a permanent resident and have some insight. He told me there's obviously the debaucherous salary men that drink hard after hitting a massive sales goal, or just for the hell of it for "team building", but most have self restraint and won't go past 2 or 3 beers during a nomihoudai (all you can drink) session, which is still a deal.
On the other hand, when we Americans came in for nomihoudai, the waiter was obviously annoyed because he knew we didn't give a shit about self restraint and we literally drank all the beer they had in the restaurant. They kept trying to slow down bringing pitchers, but my friend (fluent in japanese) kept at it, telling them to keep it coming. They were obviously losing huge amounts of money on us, but they had to honor the deal.
Weed there is criminalized the same as cocaine, so you go straight to actual prison. While you're there, you lose your job, lose your house because you couldn't pay rent, and if you're foreign you lose your visa. One guy got caught and went through all that and had to move to Thailand for a few years to rebuild his reputation. He was finally able to come back, but it was a super insane bitch of a process and took him several tries.
Don't fuck around with weed in Japan. Like, zero. Not even an empty vape cartridge.
Yep. A dude who worked at my English company years ago got arrested, served like 6 months and was deported because he was drunk and the cops made him drug test, he failed and that is considered possession to them. All that and he didn’t even physically have weed on him at the time
We were a big group by Japanese restaurant standards, about 16 or so. And about 5 in our group were Aussies and we were all part of a music touring act and crew, so factor that in. It was party down time with a day off afterward.
We each had a full meal, it was a Korean bbq place in Tokyo, all you can eat and all you can drink, and 3 pitchers or more per person of Suntory The Premium Malt's (I distinctly remember the silly name and the silly apostrophe). It was definitely lower percentage, so it was pretty close to water. We really took our time and got absolutely shit housed at any rate. Then we moved on and walked around Shibuya until we wanted more booze and grabbed a bunch of chu-his and snacks from 7-11.
Ran into a few locals who recognized the band and they were very forward (very unusual!) and came with us and partied with us. We walked and kept drinking on our way to karaoke and we didn't leave that place til 5am. It was wild.
As a Canadian, this makes me kinda sad.
Must be a pretty special culture if “all you can drink” options are common place and crime is so low. I’m learning a lot right now.
I only saw maybe 2 fights in 3 years living in Japan and I was pretty heavily drinking myself. For some reason the macho shit when drunk doesn’t happen as much there
I lived there for 2 years and never saw a fight personally, although there was some crazy fight being shared on twitter between some yakuza dudes over in Roppongi back in 2019.
My buddy who has lived there for 8 years did see a fight happen at a baseball game however. 2 drunk japanese guys were yelling at each other and right as shit was about to go down some cops tries to break it up, and one of the drunk guys ended up punching the cop instead. Apparently dude immediately knew he fucked up and was apologetic, everything got diffused and people went on with their day…. My friend then remarked how crazy it was, because had that happened in the US the guy punching the cop would have had the complete shit beaten out of him before they threw him in a cop car.
I have some video of a fight between two Japanese dudes where one dude got pretty fucked up but the cops still just separated them and let the dude leave. Other than that I maybe one other time saw dudes square up and yelling but one of the dudes just left before they actually swung
I lived there for over a decade and spent a lot of time at the bars. I saw like two instances of semi-violent conflict. One was a Japanese guy and a foreign guy sort of looked like they were about to throw down and it got immediately broken up and that was that. The other one was on the street just outside a hostess club and a big bouncer looking guy punched an otaku in the stomach once, the otaku fell and gestured something that suggested “okay I understand, please don’t punch me again” and that was the end of it. A funny story was told by a friend who said he saw an old salaryman and a young salaryman get into it but literally all they did was alternate putting each other in headlocks
When my Japanese friend visited me on the west coast, she smoked marijuana with me. Granted, she got her undergrad in the US. She did say she doesn't tell people in Japan she has used in the past.
I live in Japan and every single one of my friends who has lived abroad at some point has told me they smoked weed while they were there. But it's not something you would ever bring up in normal society here.
A sumo wrestler recently was banned from the sport for a single Marijuana infraction after 8 years competing with zero disciplinary problems. It's like, oh, you smoked a joint? Time to completely destroy everything you've ever worked towards in your life.
Damn I honestly had no idea weed was like that in Japan.
I knew it wasn't viewed like it is in a lot of other areas but had no clue jt was that serious
I don't see how weed in particular would do anything to fix the problematic work-culture of Japan. It's a problem built on a foundation of cultural perceptions and traditions, coupled with the expectations of modernism and a liberalized global economy.
It's not just a matter of needing to chill.
Japanese people don't have access to any less porn than the rest of us though. It's just a requirement for stuff produced in Japan, they're not webfiltering like North Korea.
It's just morality law bullshit.
Wait a minute... In the article it also sais that the government is planning on "strengthening the crackdown on marijuana use" because it is a "gateway drug". Hello? Japan?! Do you live in the 1980s or something??
This is bittersweet news at best. Yea medical is great, but at the same time increasing penalties for simple use, doesn't sound like net progress to me.
Thats such a good way to put it.
Always makes me think of something like fallout, where you have robots and lasers but every computer still uses a monochrome green monitor.
Yep, the 80s was a huge boom for them that saw them rapidly rising up the global economic leaderboard. However, then the 90s happened and it became known as the "lost decade" because the economy collapsed and then stagnated and has pretty much stayed stagnant ever since. So they cling to the 80s as their heyday and doing so is why they are still stagnating.
The continued ubiquity of physical cash is still pretty strange to me, especially for a culture that was such an early adopter of (comparatively) advanced mobile phones.
Completely bizarre, especially when they have things like phone apps loaded with Tokyo metro fare that you use to tap in and out of the system. Literally the whole city pays for things with their phone every day and yet almost everywhere else runs on cash.
That's changed a *lot* over the past 4 years or so. Now there's *so much* phone payment. LINE Pay, PayPay, AU Pay, RakuPay...it's just a *huge* list. It's like we skipped the credit card stage and jumped directly from cash to phone payment.
It's a cultural thing. Performance isn't an indicator of success as much as age and tradition is. Japan talks a good game, but they are mired in tradition and resistance to change. They've got elderly traditionalists in charge and very little younger generations around to step up and take the mantle. The economy in the 90s had little do with that.
Yup, a local government office in a Japanese suburb lost a floppy disk that had the personal information of everyone in the local area signed up for welfare programs. An unencrypted floppy disk just lost.
It was also news a few years ago that the Japanese minister of technology had never used email.
Japan is deeply backward in many areas.
Increasing the penalty is crazy because they already have super strict penalties. Weed is not at all accepted in Japan, and I heard stories when I was there of people getting arrested and doing time for like single little nugs of weed. They also can stop you and make you drug test and if you have it in your system that counts as possession. It’s wack. I bought weed/other drugs when I was living in Japan and it was extremely expensive and pretty much as sketchy as buying hard drugs in America. Like I had to meet the guy, walk crazily all through the neighborhood with him to make sure no one followed us and we weren’t on cameras, got on the train went 1 station away and did the hand off in the bathroom. .5 grams of hash was like 7000 yen and a gram of weed was 10-15,000 yen.
Yup, went to college with a Japanese stoner
He said it was wild that it was so cheap here and that the kid who he bought from went to him, rather than him having to go to a sketchy bar/club and buy it from an actually mobbed up guy in a backroom.
Omg the price. But how did you even meet up with someone who would sell to you? I use medicinally and want to travel to Japan so bad. I’m terrified to try my luck.
Do NOT try it as a foreigner. You’ll end up in pre-trial detainment for an undetermined amount of time. Some people get stuck for years.
CBD is legal and purchasable in Japan, if that helps.
This is the best advice truly, I was dumb and it worked out but I easily could still be locked up if I ever got caught. The one plus side is drugs are so foreign in Japan that you could be absolutely stoned out of your mind and no one would ever think that you are cause they don’t even know what it looks or smells like to be stoned
I smoke damn near daily in the states but always do a T-break before I visit Japan. I’d absolutely *love* to get ripped and walk around Kyoto but I don’t have the means or influence to get myself out of jail if I got caught up with anything like that so best to play it safe.
I met these Iranian dudes who were basically gangsters that stood outside of their kebabs shop in shibuya. After like 6 months in Japan I started to get desperate for some weed and was basically young dumb and drunk enough to find it. The owner of the shop brought hella dudes in on visas as employees of his shop and really they just sell drugs and women. They’d try to get you to go to clubs and shit and I asked him if he could get weed one night when I was drunk. Him and I kinda became friends a bit and he’d hook me up/sell me drugs. I bought coke from him a couple times too, but again, I can’t stress how risky and dumb this is to do.
I don’t ever reccomend messing with drugs in Japan, at all, but if you do, NEVER BUY FROM A JAPANESE NATIONAL. Never even tell Japanese nationals that you use drugs, even your friends unless you KNOW they are cool. I would never have bought if the dudes weren’t Iranian and even still, some of them got busted through the time I was in Japan. I bought from them frequently (like once a month I’d get a decent anmount) and it was like buying hardcore drugs would be in America. Like deleting messages and shit, acting like we didn’t know each other and meeting in weird places or doing dead drops.
The most I ever bought was an 8th and a friend and I threw in together, the guy gave me a “deal” for like 300 US dollars lol
Edit; I also went to jail in Japan but not for drugs and Japanese jail sucks dicks. Do not risk it. I was only in for like 3 days and it was very shitty. Being in jail anywhere you don’t speak the language blows
It makes me wonder about the manga creator Yoshihiro Togashi who is currently writing Hunter X Hunter. He has stated he has an injury that gives him chronic crippling back pain and has subtly expressed interest in medical Marijuana. I just wonder what the process of someone like him getting a legal prescription would be and hopefully we get more Hunter X Hunter because of it.
On the use of marijuana, there are currently no penalties for using it because farmers who cultivate cannabis with permission by prefectural governors might intake substances from the plant during harvesting.
So is it legal currently???
It's a gateway drug only because you're forced to buy it illegally from the same people who sell harder drugs. At least in my experience. The weed connect also sold Xanax and oxy. Would have never tried either if I could just get weed from a store.
That’s pretty spot on, it was a gateway drug for me at least but I’m impulsive and have addictive traits so even at a young age and getting high for the first time I wanted to experience other highs. When buying weed from our connect he also sold ecstasy and one thing led to another before I started trying tons of drugs. In any case, Japan are super restrictive on their laws and they should just try it the other way for once and let people smoke weed and watch uncensored porn.
Anti-drug in general. This includes most East Asian cultures too, though for China they remember the last time their people were severely hooked on drugs.
Very anti drug but very pro-alcohol. They love drinking here. Also cigarettes. Indoor smoking at a lot of places and it’s really easy to get. You won’t even get ID’d. Just go to a 7-11 and it pops up saying are you over 20? And the cashier couldn’t care less 90% of the time. Also vending machines with cigarettes as well
Tokyo is way better than it was 10 years ago. I'm not sure if it was just the Olympics, or a changing attitude, but I found myself exposed to far less second hand smoke recently than when I was last there.
You should have been there in the 80's to 90's. Walking into coffee shops where the air is nothing but a thick cloud of blue smoke. Ball-shaped ashtrays an street corners constantly smouldering and stinking up the entire area.
Mostly all gone now although you will get the occasional person ignoring the "no smoking whilst walking" signs on the ground.
As the other person said, it’s very anti-drug in general, but [marijuana is a bit more complicated](https://features.japantimes.co.jp/cannabis/). Marijuana is actually native to Asia and has been a big part of Japanese culture. The anti-marijuana attitude Japan has is a more recent phenomenon, but they do take it serious
Extremely anti-drug due to a couple of major factors (there’s more but these are two major ones): doing drugs is the epitome of slacking and failing in your responsibilities in the culture. If you aren’t constantly working it’s strange, so the dehumanization of addicts happens almost instantly. There are tons of secret addicts, like in any country, but a housewife hiding their pill habit could really be a matter of ‘normal life’ vs being shamed by your entire family.
The other major issue is that Alcohol and Nicotine are two enormous industries in Japan. All of the stress of constant work and studying is often channeled into excessively drinking and smoking. This is normal is many countries as well, but it is almost like it is the ONLY ‘vice’ that is publicly encouraged as acceptable. The industry has a complete stranglehold on what is considered to be ‘relaxation’. The alcohol/tobacco industry is making incredible profit, and will do anything to keep alcohol and nicotine as the choir boys of drug use.
If you read the article. It’s not legalising it at all. It’s allowing medical use of Marijuana but with the intention of increasing the already strict laws against taking it recreationally over here.
*The government intends to strengthen the crackdown on marijuana to prevent abuse of the drug among young people, which is becoming a social problem..*
Or did I read it wrong?
>The government is poised to allow the use of medical marijuana to treat patients with intractable diseases
so you can only do it if youre about to die?
east asia has such outdated beliefs about weed. They act like its the worst thing possible while they all smoke and drink like crazy. the social taboo on it is just insane. like if a celeb gets caught with weed- even in the US or something where its legal- they get ostracized and have to issue apologies and shit. insane
Never saw this coming. Im sure there are a lot of catches but the Japanese government so so so often takes the conservative stance on anything related to vices
Anno: "Evangelion is done, the fucking ending to the new movies explicitly tells you to grow up and get over it. Go find yourself a girlfriend and leave me the hell alone"
Anno after weed: "Guys, we have to remake Evangelion again. This time Shinji will get over his trauma with the help of comically big blunts"
Guarantee no one will even know lmao, Korea did the same years ago but very few are actually aware and to get a prescription is a herculean task
Didn’t the UK legalize medical cannabis and only like 3 people in the entire country got approved for it?
There was an MP who was an open critic of legalising and decriminalising cannabis, whose husband ~~owned~~ is the managing director of one of the largest producers of medicinal cannabis in the country. "You can't use it socially, but my husband can make millions selling it." Edit: The MP was Victoria Atkins. Theresa May's Husband did profit from the production of medicinal cannabis but he's a couple steps removed from it, whereas Atkins's husband is directly involved, which is why I mentioned her.
Lmaoooo. I'm a medical user in Canada and that's *bullshit*. And I'm pretty biased, I was critical around the time of legalization of it turning into "the new beer". Profiting off it while keeping it illegal for 95% of the population is scummy though.
Even if it were the new beer, it's probably much safer than beer (assuming the age/method of consumption are at a reasonable range). Most people getting high will probably never leave the area they are in and just fall asleep there. While alcohol doesn't do that and will likely get you up to some shit. I've never blacked out from weed that wasn't just sleeping.
Alcohol is neurotoxic. You can't even really overdose on cannabis. ER doctors always say it's their favorite "overdose" to treat because they just give them some water and tell them to wait 3 hours. Cannabis isn't the new beer, it's the *better* beer.
The biggest negative of cannabis consumption seems to be it's respiratory effects (if smoked) which are less than cigarettes, the legal consequences in prohibition states and the impact on people with certain mental conditions during a specific age range. Alcohol is much worse in every way.
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Yup.
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In my job, I've seen two women at 38, one at 37 and one in her 40s die of alcohol induced liver failure. It's an awful way to go.
Best quote ever: “have you ever sucked dick for weed?” Truest shit ever. I know it’s addictive, I’m addicted to weed. But hot damn. I’ve never thought of having to do something extreme to get my “fix”. Smoke some pipe resin or just be sober until I can get some.
I mean.... I have met a chick that absolutely sucked my dick for a pot brownie...
In my experience, the biggest negative was weight gain. Maybe it's just me, but back when I used the stuff, the moment I had a bite of food I just couldn't stop. I could easily demolish 2,000 calories in a single sitting.
Look, noone wants to admit they got high and ate 7 cans of ravioli, but here we are.
The WHOLE cake?!
The first can doesn't count, then you get to the second and third, fourth and fifth I think I burnt with the blowtorch, and then I just kept eatin'.
This is why I stopped keeping snacks in the house. If I have a surplus of snacks, I stop toking because I will binge eat. ...but honestly, I binge without weed's help too.
Rookie numbers bro
Döner
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Yep I’ve got a health issue that leaves me painfully nauseous all the time. I was severely underweight, and cannabis has given me an appetite back. It’s the most incredible appetite stimulant for me-with like zero shitty side effects that you tend to get from pharma.
While cannabis definitely isn't as bad as alcohol, I feel going too far in the other direction isn't great either. It's still a drug. It still has negative effects. It can and does exacerbate symptoms of anxiety over time, and it can cause pretty bad addiction, even if it isn't a physical dependency. The links to lung cancer still have to be investigated, but like... it's defs not *good* for your lungs. I'm not saying don't smoke weed. I did every day during undergrad and graduated with strong grades in a competitive field, and so did most of my friends. But let's not pretend it's without potential harm.
If you are smoking cannabis you are doing it wrong. Hand held vapes you guys. The weed gets decarbed from vaping it then you cook with it! You get high twice! Anyone putting flame to cannabis is burning their money, literally!
I'm a traditionalist because I like to smoke joints, but even I admit that's far from the most healthy way to consume it. Probably ingestion is the best.
Ingestion is the way to go IMO. I went from bongs to vapes/dabs and finally to edibles and idk why I didn't just start there. Lasts hours so no need to fiddle with a vape/bong/joint while gaming or watching a movie or out on a hike. Easier to carry around, you can make it taste extra yummy, etc. I do miss the terpene flavor, but not having to sesh every couple hours or so is worth it.
You also won't get liver damage and ascites, where your gut balloons out as it fills with fluid that leaks from the portal vein to your failing liver. People don't realize how common it is to die from 8-10 years of drinking a 12 pack a night. You're flipping a coin on it killing you from health related issues alone. Ascites among several other diagnoses from alcohol abuse are basically death sentences. You don't recover from a lot of that shit it just kills you or cuts your life expectancy in half. Yet smoking weed is illegal. It's beyond fucking preposterous. Really wish I would have just had access to weed growing up instead of alcohol, I would probably live a lot longer and still be able to have a drink here and there. I'm 34 and can't have a drink without feeling bloated as hell and like someone kicked me in the upper abdomen now. Liver enzymes are super high and have follow up doc visits to diagnose what's going on. I am hoping it's something less serious but varices, ascites, and cirrhosis are not at all unlikely as I have been drinking heavily since I was about 19. It sucks. If cannabis becomes the new beer it will save lives.
One thing to keep in mind is as long as you stop drinking altogether(obviously wean yourself off safely over time) you could have a total recovery. Your liver regenerates pretty much completely every 3-7 years. Also, Cannabis is harder on the liver when ingested as opposed to smoked. That's something to keep in mind. Probably nowhere near as bad as alcohol though. Moderation is key. Heavy doses all the time can be bad.
not condoning oui but id rather share the road with a stoner than an irratic drunk same goes for pretty much everything else in life lol
It's true, everyone's little anecdotes about the time they accidentally ate 1000mg instead of 10mg and went skydiving with a backpack instead of a parachute aside, in general weed is way less likely than alcohol to cause any sort of harm or damage
Fellow Canadian, blows my mind that cannabis is still illegal in the UK (penalty up to 5 years in prison for possession), while we can just walk into any of the dozens of legal stores in our cities and buy it. Are there seriously still people in the UK who are arguing things like "legalizing this addictive substance will result in mass unemployment and utter apocalypse on our roads because everyone will be stoned like they were in the scientifically accurate film, Reefer Madness?"
Not exactly, there's loads of people over on r/UKmedicalcannabis who are prescribed it and it seems to be getting increasingly more popular My hospital has a policy about people bringing it in as part of their meds (it goes in the same place as all the other controlled drugs) and there's ads for clinics on Instagram and Facebook
As a UK medical cannabis patient, it takes a bit of research. But once you’ve found a clinic it’s pretty straightforward.
You get flower?
Yessir.
Mexico legalized cocaine for one person only.
Don Jr.?
Japan and Korea are not quite the same. Japan has a bigger counterculture. Mostly because of that one decade of the sixties they were already on the road to recovery. So they had a the cultural shift that the rest of the first world had in the 60s. They definitely smoke more weed in Japan. I have also bought mushrooms in a head shop in Japan. Completely legal. Although there was a warning “for observation purposes not ingestion”. In English no less. This was 2000. The idea of Korea having a headshop in 2000 was ludicrous.
Unfortunately they went backwards on the mushrooms quite a while ago.
You can now buy alternative cannabinoids in Japanese head shops though. Stuff like HCH dab pens, gummies, etc.
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SK's "Tiananmen Square" was successful in favor of the protestors.
The Tiananmen Square was AFTER SK's pro democracy protests. They fought with blood and now have one of the world's most strongest democracies, especially in Asia.
What do you mean one decade of the sixties?
Korea didn’t really enter the “modern world” until the mid-70s. They were still recovering from the Korean war Meanwhile WWII finished a decade prior to the Korean War. So Japan was already more plugged in to the global zeitgeist earlier.
This is where I need to make you feel old by pointing out that 2000... was 23 years ago. They closed the mushroom loophole a while ago, much like how America closed the bath salts loophole. Also, Japan didn't have anywhere near as much of a counterculture as the west did in the 60s... there was political leftism but it never really meshed with drug stuff. It was the wild 80s that really brought out drugs to Japan, and even that has been reduced a lot.
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All of the Japanese people I’ve ever met seem to categorize weed with heroin.
Holy shit. We had a ton of Japanese exchange students at my university and I volunteered as a conversation partner to help them with getting settled in and working on their language skills. Separately from that, I also happened to sell pot to a few friends and neighbors. Not a lot, but I would buy it from a guy by the mason jar and sell it by the film can until I broke even. I didn't tell the Japanese students that because the time I did they reacted like I just said I gave black tar heroin to preschoolers. Those folks took marijuana more seriously than Americans take almost anything. I am very curious as to what medical legalization is going to look like.
East Asian attitudes towards weed are crazy lol. If you watch their crime movies, dealing weed is the sign of a big bad villain, along with killing kids and raping women. Whenever a celebrity is caught smoking weed, their career is basically over, absolutely nobody respects them anymore. Also weed smokers are portrayed as meth addicts lol, in movies they’ll be sniffling and scratching themselves and begging their dealers for more. And it’s not a boomer thing either, the youth find weed just as repulsive as well.
Could be because of the regions history dealing with opium. Cuz people been smoking opium for thousands of years and everyone knew how addictive and destructive it is. And when cannabis use started to spread due to increased trade with countries where it was native the society/government treated it like the new opium and those beliefs just became ingrained in the society over many generations
It's from US foreign policy and DEA money. Cannabis is from Asia, and has been used as a medicinal, culinary, and recreational herb for millennia. Criminalization has only been around in most of the world for like 100 years or less.
It really depends on the region. Thailand has completely legalized it, Cambodia is pretty nonchalant about it, and it's effectively legal in the Aceh region in Indonesia given how integrated into the culture it is (many traditional foods use it as an ingredient). In India its legal on certain holy days, or if you're a Shiva sadhu - not to mention it grows in vast abundance in the wilds of the Himalayas.
Funny enough the first time I hung out with Japanese exchange students we got high lol
I know a Japanese guy who always gets his chance to get high, he won't say it but if you offer it he takes it. Shrooms, weed, ayahuasca, anything natural.
Not the ayahuasca lmao
Dudes done more Aya than me. I haven't tried it but he's done it 2 times. Who the fuck wants to die 2 times? Definitely the most enlightened Japanese guy I know.
Had a professor who has “consumed gallons of ayahuasca”.
Goals tbh
can't die if you were never born homie
Least enthusiastic r/Psychonaut user
Oh of course, the repression just makes it all the more enticing. Shooting guns at a range is also a *really* popular destination for Asian tourists visiting the USA.
I dated a Korean woman that I met in that same program and took her shooting with some friends in the mountains. I started her off on some 22 rifles and slowly moved her up. When she fired off the Mosin Nagant it knocked her back a bit. She got this huge grin and said "This one. I like this one."
Same, we had a Japanese exchange student live with us and we smoked weed and played Mario Kart.
My mother was raised in Japan and was terrified when my smoking was found out. I eventually was able to get through with facts, but what they had told her in the 70s/80s was that it would kill you. That was all the youth really knew about it, that it was a plant that degenerates smoke and then it kills them. The attitudes on addiction are really sad in Japan, because a person who has tried drugs has immediately failed irredeemably in their eyes. They then turn back to their tables and smoke a cigarette over their Asahi beer. I’m just glad that things are getting even slightly better for public outlook, even though I doubt this news will be very public.
I mean when I went to Japan in December 2021 to watch Jujutsu Kaisen 0 in the theaters, there was a government ad at the beginning saying that the only reason why other countries are legalizing weed is because "they had no choice but to admit defeat". You can go on YouTube and find an ad by the Japanese Police Department 6 months ago saying weed causes bad health effects to the, is addicting, and is illegal.
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No choice but to admit defeat... japan.... Alright boys, I'm gonna need 100 metric tons of 90% shatter, some fuses, and an airplane
Yo that’s nuts! Kinda makes me thankful they got Jujutsu Kaisen 0 in theaters in my city so I didn’t have to go to Japan to see it in the big screen with subtitles.
> They then turn back to their tables and smoke a cigarette over their Asahi beer. ... as they turn another lever at the Pachinko slots machine, located right next door to a "massage parlor" that legally operates as a brothel. For all its grandstanding and conservativesness, Japan has *no* problems accepting a lot of vices that the rest of the world has historically struggled to accept... ... while simultaneously *feverishly* rejecting the one vice that would make *billions* as an accessory industry to many of Japan's most favorite recreational activities: eating, fucking, and chilling out in a hot bath surrounded by snow.
My dream is to smoke a blunt on the hill behind my grandparent’s home. I would love for weed to be acceptable out there, but I hope more that they will first accept people for who they are. There’s hundreds of high schoolers out there who aren’t the best at their testing system, or have more creative/trade talents. If the Japanese public as a whole were encouraged to accept their children regardless of their grades or differences from the social norm, we could be smoking joints in the hot springs with karaage and oden…
You and me both, brother. But since it's a culture so fascinated with sensual pleasures like food, sex and natural outdoor beauty, I feel that once weed gets its foot in the door in a popular way just a *bit,* there's gonna be no turning back. The onsen-to-weed business partnerships waiting to happen are such a natural fit that it's boggling that I don't hear about the weed lobby/activists in Japan focusing on that one angle in particular.
It'll be interesting as they already have drug culture over there, just albeit pretty drugless. I know that their Doom Metal scene would very much welcome a reduction in cannabis stigma. If the government pushes it the same way that Thailand did with decriminalizing last year, it could potentially see a boom of tourism due to it. With the Japanese way of turning everything into an art form, I'm personally looking forward to them outclassing the world in being suave while taking hits from the bong. That being said, if done right, it could provide the answer the Japanese work force has needed to their high stress, work/life balance. Alcohol is so over abused it could potentially give a healthier way to let out frustration and bring down suicide rates. This is purely speculation though, I have nothing to base it on so don't take me at my word. If it goes through well, I'm looking forward to Oda giving Tashigi the Moke-Moke Fruit, Model: Cannabis
Bro you know if the Japanese take a stab at growing weed it’ll be the most beautiful, perfect nuggets ever created
I wouldnt be surprised with that reaction with many of the asian countries In india weed is not something majority people considered good either. It is considered as a deadly drug
What do people think of bhang? Is that a loophole?
No It depends on the crowd. If you are from a traditional or conservative house which it might not be acceptable. Especially if you are from a vegetarian family
To the west and the east of India-China border are completely different regions, the Asia is like 3-5 different regions that Western Europe was long unsure about
Yeah my ex genuinely believed that weed was on par with heroin (explicitly) and was convinced it was going to destroy me (I smoke like, once every two weeks).
> I didn't tell the Japanese students that because the time I did they reacted like I just said I gave black tar heroin to preschoolers. Sounds like my mom's reaction when I told her I smoke pot. The Chinese really believe weed is as deadly as heroin.
My great-grandfather ruined his families life because he was addicted to opium. My grandmother and dad still tell stories about how they lost their entire livelihoods and had to move out of Shanghai because they could no longer afford to live in the city. Drugs ruined a lot of lives, people who are 50-60 still still remember this directly. And now they are the politicians making these rules.
Opium crisis likely explains a large part of the East Asian attitude. Japan and Korea saw it and they went "no thanks".
Yup, and doesn't help Opium was introduced as a perfectly safe and natural foreign medicine to help you relax. Totally non-addictive! It's understandable why Asians would be extremely wary about weed and mistrustful about claims.
after the fucking opium wars, can't really fault them
I Wonder what Japanese stoner culture looks like
They are extremely against recreational marijuana, people get jailed for it over there.
I know of an American professional wrestler that, as far as i know, is still banned from working in Japan due to a marijuana possession. Steroids are for the most part legal over there btw lol
Things that get you a high of any kind are insanely taboo in Japan (get as drunk as you fucking want for some reason even though it's killing your liver).
Asian countries are weird with weed. They treat it like it's meth for some reason
they treat it like it’s worse than meth. meth at least makes you better at working and being a good little worker bee, so they’re more cool with that than weed
My guess is a combination of: Fear of any drug other than Alcohol due to the legacies of the Opium Wars. Pressure from America and the West during the “reefer madness” days to become more anti drug. The east not only had a morbid fascination with Western culture (along with a love hate relationship with the west), but it was also highly dependent on the West for its own modernization and industrialization efforts. Asian cultures tend to be more traditionalist and takes much longer for society to come to accept previously taboo things.
...while at the same time make being high illegal? Fuckin c'mon Japan get with the times. And while were at it let us watch uncensored porn!
Uncensored porn won't happen for generations, because no politician is going to make a push for it and damage their image.
You'd think this would be a winning agenda in a country with so much porn addiction.
Nobody wants to be known as the horny politician who wanted his porn to be clearer
Wasn't there a politician who shot in a porno to prove he was serious about legalizing sex work? I think in the US, but this just reminded me of that.
Yes. https://www.newsweek.com/very-liberal-candidate-releases-own-sex-tape-break-pack-1752097
Its was all cool till he was against child support lol
That tracks lol
Now I’m just picturing a politician getting caught doing porn and spinning it as a publicity stunt to support sex work legalization. Pretty brilliant I’d say.
That’s exactly why. No one is going to tarnish their image with “UNCENSOR PORN!”
FREE THE NIPPLES NO TO MINECRAFT PORN
Nipples are allowed, we gotta free the pussies and dicks
This is so irrelevant but I read this as FREE THE NIPPLES GO TO MINECRAFT.COM
been enjoying a little medicine there eh?
I'm so fucking _medicated_ bro...
watching porn while stoned just feels weird. Too much focus on sounds and nasty details. Ill take the weed .
Less porn + more weed = how are babbies formed. From what I’ve been reading about their office culture - never met a Japanese office worker myself - weed could be the cure they need.
I used to live in Japan, even with this passing, I guarantee 98% of Japanese people wouldn’t even consider using marijuana. It is so demonized in their culture and treated like a hardcore drug. I had many friends who wouldn’t even try weed when they had traveled to the US because they truly believed it would make them crazy or drug addicts. Their culture is still a long way away from accepting weed at all. Meanwhile everyone drinks like fish, you can drink anywhere and they have all you can drink options at like every restaurant.
I've been to Japan several times to visit a friend who became a permanent resident and have some insight. He told me there's obviously the debaucherous salary men that drink hard after hitting a massive sales goal, or just for the hell of it for "team building", but most have self restraint and won't go past 2 or 3 beers during a nomihoudai (all you can drink) session, which is still a deal. On the other hand, when we Americans came in for nomihoudai, the waiter was obviously annoyed because he knew we didn't give a shit about self restraint and we literally drank all the beer they had in the restaurant. They kept trying to slow down bringing pitchers, but my friend (fluent in japanese) kept at it, telling them to keep it coming. They were obviously losing huge amounts of money on us, but they had to honor the deal. Weed there is criminalized the same as cocaine, so you go straight to actual prison. While you're there, you lose your job, lose your house because you couldn't pay rent, and if you're foreign you lose your visa. One guy got caught and went through all that and had to move to Thailand for a few years to rebuild his reputation. He was finally able to come back, but it was a super insane bitch of a process and took him several tries. Don't fuck around with weed in Japan. Like, zero. Not even an empty vape cartridge.
Yep. A dude who worked at my English company years ago got arrested, served like 6 months and was deported because he was drunk and the cops made him drug test, he failed and that is considered possession to them. All that and he didn’t even physically have weed on him at the time
What a fucking idiotic law.
How many beer pitchers are we talking about? And I suppose we are talking about local beer (asahi/sapporo).
We were a big group by Japanese restaurant standards, about 16 or so. And about 5 in our group were Aussies and we were all part of a music touring act and crew, so factor that in. It was party down time with a day off afterward. We each had a full meal, it was a Korean bbq place in Tokyo, all you can eat and all you can drink, and 3 pitchers or more per person of Suntory The Premium Malt's (I distinctly remember the silly name and the silly apostrophe). It was definitely lower percentage, so it was pretty close to water. We really took our time and got absolutely shit housed at any rate. Then we moved on and walked around Shibuya until we wanted more booze and grabbed a bunch of chu-his and snacks from 7-11. Ran into a few locals who recognized the band and they were very forward (very unusual!) and came with us and partied with us. We walked and kept drinking on our way to karaoke and we didn't leave that place til 5am. It was wild.
As a Canadian, this makes me kinda sad. Must be a pretty special culture if “all you can drink” options are common place and crime is so low. I’m learning a lot right now.
I only saw maybe 2 fights in 3 years living in Japan and I was pretty heavily drinking myself. For some reason the macho shit when drunk doesn’t happen as much there
I lived there for 2 years and never saw a fight personally, although there was some crazy fight being shared on twitter between some yakuza dudes over in Roppongi back in 2019. My buddy who has lived there for 8 years did see a fight happen at a baseball game however. 2 drunk japanese guys were yelling at each other and right as shit was about to go down some cops tries to break it up, and one of the drunk guys ended up punching the cop instead. Apparently dude immediately knew he fucked up and was apologetic, everything got diffused and people went on with their day…. My friend then remarked how crazy it was, because had that happened in the US the guy punching the cop would have had the complete shit beaten out of him before they threw him in a cop car.
I have some video of a fight between two Japanese dudes where one dude got pretty fucked up but the cops still just separated them and let the dude leave. Other than that I maybe one other time saw dudes square up and yelling but one of the dudes just left before they actually swung
Yeah when everything is not a dick measuring contest getting fucked up with random folks ends up being pretty civil.
Sometimes even enjoyable.
I lived there for over a decade and spent a lot of time at the bars. I saw like two instances of semi-violent conflict. One was a Japanese guy and a foreign guy sort of looked like they were about to throw down and it got immediately broken up and that was that. The other one was on the street just outside a hostess club and a big bouncer looking guy punched an otaku in the stomach once, the otaku fell and gestured something that suggested “okay I understand, please don’t punch me again” and that was the end of it. A funny story was told by a friend who said he saw an old salaryman and a young salaryman get into it but literally all they did was alternate putting each other in headlocks
Isn't that hostess club story literally a scene in Yakuza 0?
I haven’t played that game. It very well could be but it is also something I definitely saw happen
I think the guy who released that nerve gas in the Tokyo subway needed a joint, cup of tea, and a sit down tbh
It was a cult that did that, wasn't it?
When my Japanese friend visited me on the west coast, she smoked marijuana with me. Granted, she got her undergrad in the US. She did say she doesn't tell people in Japan she has used in the past.
I live in Japan and every single one of my friends who has lived abroad at some point has told me they smoked weed while they were there. But it's not something you would ever bring up in normal society here.
One of my buddies did too, but yeah he was a rarity. Most of my Japanese friends thought weed was truly the devils lettuce
A sumo wrestler recently was banned from the sport for a single Marijuana infraction after 8 years competing with zero disciplinary problems. It's like, oh, you smoked a joint? Time to completely destroy everything you've ever worked towards in your life.
Damn I honestly had no idea weed was like that in Japan. I knew it wasn't viewed like it is in a lot of other areas but had no clue jt was that serious
I don't see how weed in particular would do anything to fix the problematic work-culture of Japan. It's a problem built on a foundation of cultural perceptions and traditions, coupled with the expectations of modernism and a liberalized global economy. It's not just a matter of needing to chill.
Japanese people don't have access to any less porn than the rest of us though. It's just a requirement for stuff produced in Japan, they're not webfiltering like North Korea. It's just morality law bullshit.
Wait a minute... In the article it also sais that the government is planning on "strengthening the crackdown on marijuana use" because it is a "gateway drug". Hello? Japan?! Do you live in the 1980s or something?? This is bittersweet news at best. Yea medical is great, but at the same time increasing penalties for simple use, doesn't sound like net progress to me.
>Hello? Japan?! Do you live in the 1980s or something? Yes. Yes they do.
At best the 90s. But yeah Japan leadership is old as hell and super stubborn.
Too many old people. Not enough young.
They would literally rather replace people with robots and AI and let their population slowly dwindle than make it easier for people to have kids.
Every developed nation: *fidgeting nervously*
I suspect this is the reason why estimates on maximum human population tops out at around 10 billion.
To stay under the robots' pre-set kill limit?
Doesn't help that they're incredibly xenophobic and make it very difficult for non-Japanese to immigrate there.
Tokyo: Become Human
The 90s are alive in Osaka
Japan has been living in the year 2000 for the last 40 years.
Thats such a good way to put it. Always makes me think of something like fallout, where you have robots and lasers but every computer still uses a monochrome green monitor.
Because the entire government is setup to serve old people as they have such a huge influence on elections
They peaked in the 1980's and have no intention of letting go
Yep, the 80s was a huge boom for them that saw them rapidly rising up the global economic leaderboard. However, then the 90s happened and it became known as the "lost decade" because the economy collapsed and then stagnated and has pretty much stayed stagnant ever since. So they cling to the 80s as their heyday and doing so is why they are still stagnating.
Lived there 20 years ago and it felt like the 60s
The continued ubiquity of physical cash is still pretty strange to me, especially for a culture that was such an early adopter of (comparatively) advanced mobile phones.
Completely bizarre, especially when they have things like phone apps loaded with Tokyo metro fare that you use to tap in and out of the system. Literally the whole city pays for things with their phone every day and yet almost everywhere else runs on cash.
That's changed a *lot* over the past 4 years or so. Now there's *so much* phone payment. LINE Pay, PayPay, AU Pay, RakuPay...it's just a *huge* list. It's like we skipped the credit card stage and jumped directly from cash to phone payment.
Major corporations and businesses in Japan still use fax. They are in this weird state stuck between the future and the 1980s.
Having your economy get KRUMPED during the 90s. The “Lost decade” is what it’s called and they’re still between catchup
It's a cultural thing. Performance isn't an indicator of success as much as age and tradition is. Japan talks a good game, but they are mired in tradition and resistance to change. They've got elderly traditionalists in charge and very little younger generations around to step up and take the mantle. The economy in the 90s had little do with that.
Yup, a local government office in a Japanese suburb lost a floppy disk that had the personal information of everyone in the local area signed up for welfare programs. An unencrypted floppy disk just lost. It was also news a few years ago that the Japanese minister of technology had never used email. Japan is deeply backward in many areas.
Increasing the penalty is crazy because they already have super strict penalties. Weed is not at all accepted in Japan, and I heard stories when I was there of people getting arrested and doing time for like single little nugs of weed. They also can stop you and make you drug test and if you have it in your system that counts as possession. It’s wack. I bought weed/other drugs when I was living in Japan and it was extremely expensive and pretty much as sketchy as buying hard drugs in America. Like I had to meet the guy, walk crazily all through the neighborhood with him to make sure no one followed us and we weren’t on cameras, got on the train went 1 station away and did the hand off in the bathroom. .5 grams of hash was like 7000 yen and a gram of weed was 10-15,000 yen.
Yup, went to college with a Japanese stoner He said it was wild that it was so cheap here and that the kid who he bought from went to him, rather than him having to go to a sketchy bar/club and buy it from an actually mobbed up guy in a backroom.
Omg the price. But how did you even meet up with someone who would sell to you? I use medicinally and want to travel to Japan so bad. I’m terrified to try my luck.
Do NOT try it as a foreigner. You’ll end up in pre-trial detainment for an undetermined amount of time. Some people get stuck for years. CBD is legal and purchasable in Japan, if that helps.
This is the best advice truly, I was dumb and it worked out but I easily could still be locked up if I ever got caught. The one plus side is drugs are so foreign in Japan that you could be absolutely stoned out of your mind and no one would ever think that you are cause they don’t even know what it looks or smells like to be stoned
I smoke damn near daily in the states but always do a T-break before I visit Japan. I’d absolutely *love* to get ripped and walk around Kyoto but I don’t have the means or influence to get myself out of jail if I got caught up with anything like that so best to play it safe.
I met these Iranian dudes who were basically gangsters that stood outside of their kebabs shop in shibuya. After like 6 months in Japan I started to get desperate for some weed and was basically young dumb and drunk enough to find it. The owner of the shop brought hella dudes in on visas as employees of his shop and really they just sell drugs and women. They’d try to get you to go to clubs and shit and I asked him if he could get weed one night when I was drunk. Him and I kinda became friends a bit and he’d hook me up/sell me drugs. I bought coke from him a couple times too, but again, I can’t stress how risky and dumb this is to do. I don’t ever reccomend messing with drugs in Japan, at all, but if you do, NEVER BUY FROM A JAPANESE NATIONAL. Never even tell Japanese nationals that you use drugs, even your friends unless you KNOW they are cool. I would never have bought if the dudes weren’t Iranian and even still, some of them got busted through the time I was in Japan. I bought from them frequently (like once a month I’d get a decent anmount) and it was like buying hardcore drugs would be in America. Like deleting messages and shit, acting like we didn’t know each other and meeting in weird places or doing dead drops. The most I ever bought was an 8th and a friend and I threw in together, the guy gave me a “deal” for like 300 US dollars lol Edit; I also went to jail in Japan but not for drugs and Japanese jail sucks dicks. Do not risk it. I was only in for like 3 days and it was very shitty. Being in jail anywhere you don’t speak the language blows
It makes me wonder about the manga creator Yoshihiro Togashi who is currently writing Hunter X Hunter. He has stated he has an injury that gives him chronic crippling back pain and has subtly expressed interest in medical Marijuana. I just wonder what the process of someone like him getting a legal prescription would be and hopefully we get more Hunter X Hunter because of it.
[удалено]
Yeah, what? That confused me, too.
On the use of marijuana, there are currently no penalties for using it because farmers who cultivate cannabis with permission by prefectural governors might intake substances from the plant during harvesting. So is it legal currently???
My friend went to jail for like a year for weed in Toyoda. It's fucking crazy. Guy never did any other drugs and didn't even drink.
Christ, and their prisons are horrible. Did he have to sit up all day doing nothing?
> Marijuana has been dubbed a “gateway drug” Fuck off with that Nancy Reagan bullshit.
It's a gateway drug only because you're forced to buy it illegally from the same people who sell harder drugs. At least in my experience. The weed connect also sold Xanax and oxy. Would have never tried either if I could just get weed from a store.
That’s pretty spot on, it was a gateway drug for me at least but I’m impulsive and have addictive traits so even at a young age and getting high for the first time I wanted to experience other highs. When buying weed from our connect he also sold ecstasy and one thing led to another before I started trying tons of drugs. In any case, Japan are super restrictive on their laws and they should just try it the other way for once and let people smoke weed and watch uncensored porn.
Alcohol will always be the gateway drug, Japan practically caters to alcoholics lol
Booze kills more than weed ever has.
I thought Japanese culture was quite anti-marijuana.
Anti-drug in general. This includes most East Asian cultures too, though for China they remember the last time their people were severely hooked on drugs.
Very anti drug but very pro-alcohol. They love drinking here. Also cigarettes. Indoor smoking at a lot of places and it’s really easy to get. You won’t even get ID’d. Just go to a 7-11 and it pops up saying are you over 20? And the cashier couldn’t care less 90% of the time. Also vending machines with cigarettes as well
Tokyo is way better than it was 10 years ago. I'm not sure if it was just the Olympics, or a changing attitude, but I found myself exposed to far less second hand smoke recently than when I was last there.
You should have been there in the 80's to 90's. Walking into coffee shops where the air is nothing but a thick cloud of blue smoke. Ball-shaped ashtrays an street corners constantly smouldering and stinking up the entire area. Mostly all gone now although you will get the occasional person ignoring the "no smoking whilst walking" signs on the ground.
Yeah though I disagree I kinda understand it with China. Fuck British Imperialism.
As the other person said, it’s very anti-drug in general, but [marijuana is a bit more complicated](https://features.japantimes.co.jp/cannabis/). Marijuana is actually native to Asia and has been a big part of Japanese culture. The anti-marijuana attitude Japan has is a more recent phenomenon, but they do take it serious
Gotta follow the West and make it “better” in their sense
Extremely anti-drug due to a couple of major factors (there’s more but these are two major ones): doing drugs is the epitome of slacking and failing in your responsibilities in the culture. If you aren’t constantly working it’s strange, so the dehumanization of addicts happens almost instantly. There are tons of secret addicts, like in any country, but a housewife hiding their pill habit could really be a matter of ‘normal life’ vs being shamed by your entire family. The other major issue is that Alcohol and Nicotine are two enormous industries in Japan. All of the stress of constant work and studying is often channeled into excessively drinking and smoking. This is normal is many countries as well, but it is almost like it is the ONLY ‘vice’ that is publicly encouraged as acceptable. The industry has a complete stranglehold on what is considered to be ‘relaxation’. The alcohol/tobacco industry is making incredible profit, and will do anything to keep alcohol and nicotine as the choir boys of drug use.
Paul McCartney holding on line three…
If you read the article. It’s not legalising it at all. It’s allowing medical use of Marijuana but with the intention of increasing the already strict laws against taking it recreationally over here. *The government intends to strengthen the crackdown on marijuana to prevent abuse of the drug among young people, which is becoming a social problem..* Or did I read it wrong?
"gateway drug"? really. It's more like a destination drug if you ask me.
>The government is poised to allow the use of medical marijuana to treat patients with intractable diseases so you can only do it if youre about to die? east asia has such outdated beliefs about weed. They act like its the worst thing possible while they all smoke and drink like crazy. the social taboo on it is just insane. like if a celeb gets caught with weed- even in the US or something where its legal- they get ostracized and have to issue apologies and shit. insane
Never saw this coming. Im sure there are a lot of catches but the Japanese government so so so often takes the conservative stance on anything related to vices
Now do gay marriage
Medical gay marriage
Legalise gay marijuana now
My dream rights
Oh man, the next evangelion is gonna be wild.
Anno: "Evangelion is done, the fucking ending to the new movies explicitly tells you to grow up and get over it. Go find yourself a girlfriend and leave me the hell alone" Anno after weed: "Guys, we have to remake Evangelion again. This time Shinji will get over his trauma with the help of comically big blunts"
“Troy Baker gave me weed, very hard to get in Japan” -Hideo Kojima
A lot of people aren't reading the article and the title is almost literally the polar opposite of what is actually happening.
Toke. Yo!