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

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You don't decide what other people do with THEIR BODIES, legal or not. You don't own the rest of us.

Some people live more dangerously than you & it's on you to deal with that.

I find it incredible that the argument from fatalism ("people are going to smoke dope no matter what, so let's just go ahead and legalise it") is being used in a thread where part of the very premise of that thread itself is that it has already been successfully eradicated (to a satisfactory extent) in one country in the world. Unless you're also going to put forward the laughable (and racist) suggestion, made by somebody on the first page, that the Japanese are genetically inclined to being more pliable by their government, then the argument doesn't work.

Hokkaido has plenty of Marijuana, or so I heard. It's a plant, just part of nature, you don't need to kill all Marijuana to live your life peacefully & this is none of your business.

If you don't like weed, you don't have to smoke it.

You also said you smoke tobacco anyway so I'm just not going to countenance your hippocrasy.

It's not a "fatalist," argument, it's one based on realism. Also, I find the whole notion of telling people what they can and can't put in their bodies absolutely odious. And since such policies have failed miserably in the U.S., I don't see how continually repeating them makes any sense.


Just because it worked in Japan, doesn't mean that it will work here. You're talking two cultures with vast differences. I'm just terribly predisposed to this sort of social engineering by government.

Actually, I'm sure all drugs have not been successfully eradicated in Japan, so to insist that the war on drugs has won in Japan simply because marijuana has been successfully eradicated is quite a leap, what if all that was actually accomplished is the softest drug was eradicated(You have to grow it) therefor if you want to try a drug it's going to be a much more harmful drug. Which I doubt that is even true, you're suggesting that not one person in japan smokes marijuana? That is hard to believe, maybe it's been dramatically cut down, drugs can always be imported. Marijuana is just more difficult to import and grow/make and use(Because of the strong smell) versus other more harmful drugs.

Hmmm. Is the marijuana eradication a complete lie from the start? Why am I finding recent articles of marijuana use and arrests in Japan??
https://www.dw.com/en/japan-struggles-w ... a-44094855
https://japantoday.com/category/crime/g ... -musicians
https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asi ... triggering

This whole thread is a lie. War is a lie. Prohibition is a lethal joke.

I'm not finding any articles in 2019(I forgot it's 2019, lol). But still, it's eradicated completely because of no articles in 2019? Would that be jumping to conclusions? What a way to go also, real nice play for humanity, 5 year prison sentence for getting caught smoking a joint.

I'm going to get as baked as I can after work just in case.

lol, yet it's now legal next door

Thailand's Legalization Of Medical Cannabis Proves One Very Important Thing
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrebourq ... d8555e14b3

I can sell you 5 bucks of weed or I can sell you several thousand dollars of engineering software.

Who's useless now punks?

Once a drug user in Japan, always an outcast
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/ ... GcZ3aJKiUk

OMG, wow! Sure, lets save peoples lives by completely destroying peoples lives simply because they enjoy a buzz, which doesn't mean they will be unsuccessful. Why not eradicate drug use by shooting people in the head? Insanity, pure insanity. War against people with different preferences is what it boils down to.

Wait wait, alcohol is ok, any other preference in buzz and we will completely destroy your life!

Slam dunk! The premise of this thread has just been destroyed!

Used for what though? Are you mixing it up with hemp? The US can do what it wants. I'm only interested in the UK. It was intentionally poured into society in the 50's-60's with evil intent and then laws were passed against possession in the early 70's. We already have two terrible drugs rife in society, introducing a third would be lunacy.

'Society' is well aware of thousands of dangerous drugs. What people do with drugs is up to them.

Marijuana is less dangerous than nearly all other psychoactive drugs. It's also an inextricable part of multiple religions. If you don't have respect for others' choices you will be ignored.

The use of marijuana as an intoxicant dates back to ancient times. It's been used as such at least since the 19th century in the U.S.


But it's already been introduced, how are you going to stop it, now? That's the part I'm struggling to understand. Prohibition just doesn't work. Do you want tougher and tougher laws, penalizing users, tossing them into prison? We've been doing that for years in the U.S., and it hasn't worked. Finally some sanity has begun to set in. People are realizing you can't control what everyone does.


If there is a market for a product, you won't stop it by making it illegal. The problems caused by criminalization are far worse than the one caused by the drugs. I'm all for everyone living a drug-free life. But not at the barrel of a gun.

I think the fallacy at play here is that the cannabis smokers in this thread assume that, because they can personally smoke it and have enough self control to moderate it to the point that it doesn't impact on their health and they personally have never committed acts of violence as a result of being high in the drug - that this must therefore be the case for everybody else. This is the reason why liberalism in its crude sense is so enchanting and convincing at the same time as being potentially destructive; nobody believes that HE will use HIS freedom for destructive ends, and maybe he's right, but enough people do use it for such ends that pure laissez-faire has become untenable.

The Japanese national philosophy is difficult, and that's why young millennials (and I am part of this demographic myself, of course) find it so unpalatable, but the empirical success of their philosophy is in the fact of a clean, well ordered, prosperous country with some of the best educational standards in the world, some of the lowest crime levels in the world and almost every other state of affairs the west can only envy. I think we're in denial if we assume there's no link here. I'm reminded again of BF Skinner's comment on Milton's Satan; is a miserable, backward, crime ridden, dirty hellhole like many of the larger cities in the US and the EU a good price to pay for "liberation"? Of course, liberation and freedom in the sense we in Britain and America talk about them, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in the 1970s are not true freedom anyway - but freedom to consume, which is the only reason big business is so keenly lobbying for THIS particular freedom. Imagine the same faces campaigning for any freedom worthy of the name - say freedom of speech or freedom of expression; these are precisely the freedoms the same people are campaigning to dismantle.

Last edited by Prometheus18 on 15 Feb 2019, 4:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.