A population that old and conservative loves shit like that. Also, the government urging young people to instead drink more alcohol sounds like something straight out of the Soviet Unions playbook.
Drunk people might accidentally get pregnant and help with the population. Really an obvious move
WTF? Japan, you're supposed to be doing the opposite!
Tbh, I don't expect any culture that considers tattoos to be taboo to be cool with weed.
Yeah, they have some nice things going for them but Japanese culture still very patriarchal and conservative overall
That's why they will fail
That plus a massive amount of inherent isolationism plus an extreme birth shortage and an already very aged population.
The writing is on the wall in many ways unless major, unprecedented changes were to be made. Japan in a hundred years will be unrecognizable without them.
They are some of the most repressed puritans. I would always try to get my friend to leave work early (in reality on time) so we could do something but they will not stand up for themselves. Have to put in the minimal 10hrs per day in a 40hr workweek or you are a slacker.
amid increasing concerns that the lack of a ban on use is promoting drug abuse by young people.
This fucking backwards ass notion of weed as a "gateway drug" needs to die. Their reasoning for calling it that shows their idiocy, in that it's called that because it's cheap and harmless, so they think it will lead to people believing other drugs are similar. Imagine branding something as dangerous because it's (Checks Notes) cheap and harmless.
Although from personal experience, I'd say that weed is a gateway drug of sorts, in that if you're addicted to something far more dangerous (like alcohol), using weed can act like a "gateway" to sobriety.
And yet alcohol shall not be banned.
What are they thinking?
And unlike cannabis use (as far as I'm aware), alcoholism is actually a real problem in Japan, because drinking alcohol is not only socially acceptable but downright enforced.
In my experience weed can be a gateway drug when you have to buy it from a drug dealer. As an analogy, lots of people end up buying something other than what they went into Target to buy.
Welcome to Japan, where everything, especially their mentality is fatally stuck in the glory days of the 1970/1980s.
Even today they still use fax and computer usage is the office middling and general computer literacy is abyssal.
It's Japan. If anything is promoting drug abuse, it's the work culture.
but getting blind drunk in the street every night for them is fine. Ridiculous.
I was shocked at how often you just see people laying passed out on the sidewalk or sleeping on a bench. Japan is an insanely different place after the bars start closing. Was genuinely uneasy with how many people everywhere just had zero control of themselves.
There's a reason why countries with proper transit infrastructure view alcoholism as a novelty.
Like smoking, alcohol is a huge industry in Japan. It's "normal" for Japanese companies to addict their employees to their products and because the companies ARE the government, they enact incredibly protectionist laws like this to prevent external competition.
Their economy depends on it. It's super gross. Like America and guns, or Sweden and flatpak furniture (the last one is a half joke)
If Japan starts being a cannabis producer, they'll 180 so fast you'll get vertigo.
This is worse than you think. Most countries don't criminalize use, only possession. Criminalizing use like Sweden does likely means that even having cannabis in your system is illegal and could lead to fines, criminal record, and jail time. It's insanely backwards.
Sweden is nuts. When I moved here, I was shocked. It's really backwards. Everyone drinks here, but weed is something like heroin to them. They should all smoke weed.
As a swede: Word. It's backwards as fuck here. The previous government didn't even want to investigate whether or not to decriminalize, because doing so (investigate, mind you) would "send the wrong signals". Yeeah fuck science and people's lives when you have "signals" to worry about.
Part of the world: takes a step forward
Japan: not on my fucking watch
Wasn’t it already illegal. My wife’s cousin served two years for an amount that is so small police wouldn’t even bother to confiscate it in europe.
Yeah, it's news to me that it wasn't technically illegal. They still believe in the reefer madness shit and act like it.
I don't like weed. I've tried it throughout my teens, but left it there.
With that said, it's amazing to me that we're still having the same conversations around drugs. Decriminalise EVERYTHING! Ensure what is on the market is clean, drive the costs down to remove criminals from the market, and dedicate every police force to protecting those on the bottom rung of the drug ladder.
I read a book from a former officer a while back, where he'd spent two years working on infiltrating a drug network. It was successful, and they not only shut down a major network of drugs, but arrested around 100 people, and removed tons of illegal weapons from the market, and arrested several people in the network known to police for being involved in several murders. They believed that the drug market in the UK during this time had been disrupted "for three hours". That was all it took for another gang to take over, and apparently it's those successes that cause a lot of people to leave drug enforcement - after all, what's the point?
There almost seems to be zero benefit to drug criminalisation, other than "old conservatives hate it".
The pant is illegal because it's cheap to grow yourself, but if you let some drug companies make money off of processing it, then it's perfectly fine to use...
I work at a company that has big offices in Japan and the US (as well as many other places) and it’s pretty interesting to see the contrasts in living standards and expectations up close.
On the one hand, when coworkers visit from Japan they are disgusted by how dirty, unsafe, and uncourteous the US is by comparison. They complain endlessly about the low quality standards of the food. I picture myself having to pick worms and hair out of everything and that’s what things seem like from their perspective.
But then some of them move to the US because they can’t handle the stuffy, oppressive attitude in Japan. Everything is about what you can’t do or aren’t supposed to do. One guy said he was so relieved to go to the US where people know how to say “we can find a way to do that.”
R2 we're supposed to be going up not down!
It's gonna create a black market
Japan sees record cannabis cases in 2023, 70% among young people
They would rather have you drink Japan urges its young people to drink more to boost economy
That’s a misleading headline. Makes it sound like 70% of young people use cannabis. The figure is that of people who were charged with cannabis related crimes, 70% were in their 20s. About 1.8% of their population had ever used cannabis in 2019.
While the possession and cultivation of marijuana are already banned in Japan, the country will prohibit its use as well, setting a prison sentence of up to seven years for violation.
Ok, so that clears that up.
I told a guy in Tokyo we smoke weed walking down the street in America and he looked at me like I was insane.
Great way to regress in societal development.
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