Japan managed to win its war on drugs. Why can't we?

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Prometheus18
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11 Feb 2019, 7:25 am

magz wrote:

Prometheus18 wrote:

I completely agree that possession of any amount of cannabis should result in criminal charges.

I completely disagree.
Let's learn from American Prohibition. Illegal but socially accepted activities are the best for mafia.

It's a fallacy to compare it to alcohol; alcohol has been consumed in the west for millennia and, like it or not, is a part of our culture - cannabis, on the other hand, is a 1960s imposition from those functionless creatures - the hippies. It can and should be eradicated while still in its nascent stages.

Biscuitman
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11 Feb 2019, 7:31 am

Prometheus18 wrote:

magz wrote:

Prometheus18 wrote:

I completely agree that possession of any amount of cannabis should result in criminal charges.

I completely disagree.
Let's learn from American Prohibition. Illegal but socially accepted activities are the best for mafia.

https://www.civilized.life/articles/the-history-of-marijuana-in-britain/

magz
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11 Feb 2019, 7:35 am

Prometheus18 wrote:

I see.
An agressive lowlife on booze is okay to the society.
An agressive lowlife on weed is a major threat because he is part of the evil hippie movement heritage.

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Mikah
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11 Feb 2019, 7:37 am

magz wrote:

Are they violent because of cannabis?
Or maybe they are violent because they are lowlifes and they take illegal drugs because of the same reason?

The countries experimenting with decriminalization and legalization don't get sudden increase in violence.

Maybe UK has some much deeper social issues with drugs being only one of the the most superficial layers?

All could be true. I offer no proof. You are right that correlation is not causation, but it's not not-causation either. People giggle about this and say that there is a correlation between cereal eating and violent crime, but this is not a meaningful correlation. The potential link between drugs and a person's mental faculties is.

Tobacco was correlated with lung cancer before causation was proved. This wasn't an idiotic correlation, though the xkcd folks might giggle about it. Burning plant matter, inhaling the smoke - correlated with lung problems. Not crazy.

Mind altering drugs - correlated with mental illness, permanent behavioural changes, a change in reasoning ability and extremely violent behaviour. Not a crazy correlation either.

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Mikah
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11 Feb 2019, 7:40 am

On Prohibition: The US authorities didn't criminalise possession of alcohol, they only went after suppliers. Effectively the same thing we do in UK today for cannabis. The result was failure in both cases. If the US had approached alcohol prohibition the way the Japanese tackled drugs in their country, Prohibition might have worked.

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Prometheus18
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11 Feb 2019, 7:40 am

magz wrote:

Prometheus18 wrote:

I see.
An agressive lowlife on booze is okay to the society.
An agressive lowlife on weed is a major threat because he is part of the evil hippie movement heritage.

That's just silly. Alcohol doesn't have the same close link to mental illness (in particular, psychosis) that cannabis does; yes, for an hour or two after getting drunk, someone might become dangerous and should be dealt with as such, but alcohol doesn't turn young men into paranoid schizophrenics or permanent useless vegetables the way cannabis does - or not with nearly the same degree of probability.

But my point was that alcohol has some historical and cultural value, aside from health considerations - cannabis, being a poison which came into favour precisely as a result of its use by a group of people who REFUSED to contribute anything to society or our cultural heritage, does not share this accolade.

magz
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11 Feb 2019, 7:43 am

Prometheus18 wrote:

Alcohol doesn't have the same close link to mental illness (in particular, psychosis) that cannabis does;

[citation needed]

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Mikah
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11 Feb 2019, 8:03 am

Prometheus18 wrote:

But my point was that alcohol has some historical and cultural value

I don't think this point needs to be made. It's only raised in response to the idea that because alcohol causes many problems and a lot of illness, we should therefore unleash other poisons in our societies. That pro-cannabis argument is stupid enough on its own without half accepting the argument.

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cemil
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11 Feb 2019, 8:15 am

Mikah wrote:

cemil wrote:

race.. its biological .

Trying to get banned are we? Japan has historically had much greater drug problems than the West has ever had. The answer to winning the drug war is actually trying to fight it in the first place. After actually enforcing (which we don't) draconian laws against drug usage, miraculously drug usage has fallen in Japan and is now almost non-existent.

if japan implements a law, chances are most people just follow.. Look at singaporean democracy.. no spit.

I cant see any white country implements a no spit law, coz white ppl are taller and stronger built and have a better protein absorption and it is the basis for individualism.

cemil
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11 Feb 2019, 8:27 am

cemil wrote:

Mikah wrote:

cemil wrote:

race.. its biological .

The east asian kind of neoteny only leads to a more hierachial society where leaders are like parents and citizens are like children.

Mikah
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11 Feb 2019, 8:29 am

cemil wrote:

I cant see any white country implements a no spit law, coz white ppl are taller and stronger built and have a better protein absorption and it is the basis for individualism.

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shlaifu
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11 Feb 2019, 10:04 am

Missing figures

Japan is unique in the world when it comes to its taste in drugs. Stimulants – overwhelmingly methamphetamine – make up 80 percent of all drug use.[7] This makes Japan a real outlier. Not only is it the only country where methamphetamine use trumps cannabis – it trumps it by a country mile. Some drugs which are popular in other parts of the world are virtually unheard of in Japan. For example, in the mid-1980s, heroin-based arrests increased by 25 percent – from 29 people to 36.[8] Cocaine, similarly, has gained very little market share.

The most obvious question is: why? “In a society of workaholics, of course it’s going to be meth,” I was told by Jake Adelstein, one of the leading experts on drugs and crime in Japan, and the author of the book Tokyo Vice. Stimulants make it possible to work longer and harder. In a country where there is even a word for “death from overwork” – a concept that doesn’t even exist in Europe or the United States – they have an obvious appeal.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/johann-ha ... e-in-world

I'd also like to add: are you sure that using cannabis to treat pain is a worse idea than using opiates?
How did the American opiate epidemic start again? Wasn't it oxycontin, prescribed for minor pain?

Norway will start giving away free heroin to addicts in 2020. Free as in: the state will produce heroin, with tax money, and give it to people who want it.
I'm curious to see how that will play out.

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Aspiegaming
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11 Feb 2019, 11:04 am

Prometheus18 wrote:

Yes, the Japanese have an admirable attitude towards drugs, as towards almost everything else. The reason cannabis is so effectively controlled over there and not over here is that

1. Since the sixties, any claim as to the existence of a socially binding moral code has been debunked as "oppressive" - or some such tripe.
2. Governments in the west, being controlled by big business, don't want to crack down on drugs - particularly cannabis - because there's so much money to be made out of them.

I completely agree that possession of any amount of cannabis should result in criminal charges.

Oh quit following the footsteps of grumpy Nixon. Weed's been used by humans long before alcohol was invented and humans then had no problem with it. The only reason it got banned was because of racism and anti-hippy...-ism. The only reason it's still banned is because conservatives refuse to let go.

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UncannyDanny
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11 Feb 2019, 11:28 am

Whatever happened to Ronald Reagan's "just say 'no'" campaign? If everyone would've just said 'non' to drugs, smoking, and all the other bad stuff, we wouldn't have this 'do drugs' peer pressure going on right now.

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11 Feb 2019, 1:08 pm

Piobaire wrote:

America is gripped in the throes of an intractable opioid crisis.
The world's largest producer of opium for the past 17 years has been under American military occupation for the past 18 years.
Perhaps winning the 'war on drugs' was never the real objective.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
John Ehrlichman

The irony is that Ehrlichman would serve time in prison for Watergate.

Also, Big Pharma is another obstacle, because cannabis would threaten their profits.

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VegetableMan
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11 Feb 2019, 1:22 pm

Aspiegaming wrote:

Prometheus18 wrote:

Actually, the primary reason marijuana got banned in the U.S. is because powerful lobbies wanted to stop the production of industrial hemp, a plant that had many uses that cut into the profits of industries like lumber and cotton. Newspaper publisher and businessman William Randolph Hearst was a major player in that campaign. They did create a lot of racist propaganda, showing crazed black and Mexicans on pot doing criminal and unspeakable things.

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