I don’t know too much about the East Asian countries other than culturally, they seem to be massively anti-drugs of any kind except tea & tobacco (with a minor exception for amphetamines because they help you work harder); every time I come across a discussion of drugs, especially psychedelics, in a Japanese or Chinese fiction or nonfiction work, I am struck by how ignorant the author obviously is and how they are peddling out of date War on Drugs & Reefer Madness hysteria.
In China, this might have something to do with the nationalist propaganda and heavy emphasis on the Opium Wars & foreign devils peddling evil foreign drugs and how the Community party Made China Great Again, but that wouldn’t explain Japan or how the South Korean media goes into raptures when a Canadian is caught with 1 marijuana plant in his closet. The Chinese government also has an interesting conflict of interest: they don’t necessarily want to invent or fund a better stimulant because that would compete with the source of something like 10% of all government revenue—the government tobacco monopoly.
Also, when drug use became socially acceptable in the West? 1960s, I guess, after Kerouac, Burroughs, etc?
Way before that. Drug use has always been a strand in the West: the Eleusianian mysteries, etc. Think William James on nitrous oxide, Freud and cocaine, heroin and opium in widespread use by regular people...
Yes, that’s true, during late XIX—early XX century drugs like cocaine and opium were in (relatively) common use. But that raises the question whether most of the XX century was an aberration in that respect, a temporary victory of puritans...
Psychedelics are a bit of a special case though, in that they became known and widespread quite late. I am sure there were some Victorian gentlemen who tried magic mushrooms and such, but it took LSD (and cheap LSD) to get psychedelics to the masses. And that happened in the West—I don’t know if East Asia ever had a wave of people experimenting with psychedelics. China was too poor and Japan was too conformist.
I don’t know too much about the East Asian countries other than culturally, they seem to be massively anti-drugs of any kind except tea & tobacco (with a minor exception for amphetamines because they help you work harder); every time I come across a discussion of drugs, especially psychedelics, in a Japanese or Chinese fiction or nonfiction work, I am struck by how ignorant the author obviously is and how they are peddling out of date War on Drugs & Reefer Madness hysteria.
In China, this might have something to do with the nationalist propaganda and heavy emphasis on the Opium Wars & foreign devils peddling evil foreign drugs and how the Community party Made China Great Again, but that wouldn’t explain Japan or how the South Korean media goes into raptures when a Canadian is caught with 1 marijuana plant in his closet. The Chinese government also has an interesting conflict of interest: they don’t necessarily want to invent or fund a better stimulant because that would compete with the source of something like 10% of all government revenue—the government tobacco monopoly.
Which is interesting as the Chinese traditional medicine heavily relies on hundreds of plant preparations, some with (claimed) nootropic properties.
Also, when drug use became socially acceptable in the West? 1960s, I guess, after Kerouac, Burroughs, etc?
Way before that. Drug use has always been a strand in the West: the Eleusianian mysteries, etc. Think William James on nitrous oxide, Freud and cocaine, heroin and opium in widespread use by regular people...
Yes, that’s true, during late XIX—early XX century drugs like cocaine and opium were in (relatively) common use. But that raises the question whether most of the XX century was an aberration in that respect, a temporary victory of puritans...
Psychedelics are a bit of a special case though, in that they became known and widespread quite late. I am sure there were some Victorian gentlemen who tried magic mushrooms and such, but it took LSD (and cheap LSD) to get psychedelics to the masses. And that happened in the West—I don’t know if East Asia ever had a wave of people experimenting with psychedelics. China was too poor and Japan was too conformist.