15 grams of marijuana gets you a mandatory death sentence in Singapore. Why are Asian countries so rabidly against drugs compared to western countries? Are drugs viewed as a threat to the collectivist social structures in Asia?
It’s not all of Asia. Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia don’t care too much unless you’re dealing in sizable amounts of heroin. On the other hand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Japan are extremely strict. Thailand is starting to crack down as well.
From what I understand of Japan, methamphetamines became a HUGE problem after WW2. To combat this, they literally made a class of drugs simply called “drugs” and lumped everything under them (except for mushrooms, which were legal until some douchebag B-list movie star jumped off a roof and blamed it on them about 10 years ago). As far as I know the present-day penalties for weed are comparable to coke or heroin.
Japanese jails are fucked. You don’t have to worry about other prisoners…just the guards. A former colleague of mine had some idiot friends in BC who thought it would be a good idea to send him 3.5 grams of weed in a ziploc bag through the mail. The cops planned a controlled delivery and busted him. 3 years in prison with hard labour. He went in at about 220 lbs of muscle and came out at 130 lbs and he looked about 10 years older than he was. He said the guards beat the shit out of him with rattan canes on a daily basis and would turn the hose on him as he slept.
Chuck Zito said that the few months he spent in a Japanese prison for conspiracy to distribute meth were the hardest and scariest he had in his life. That should say something…
China had huge opium problems. Enter the Opium wars. At one point, Britain stopped shipping Opium to China. After the first opium war, the problem for the Chinese emperor was not that some of his subjects could not let go of a substance, but that this enriched foreign “barbarians”, who had the power to dictate the terms of the trade while the emperor was not allowed to put a halt to the trade, as he had also tried (unsuccessfully) with tobacco. China had to permit the importation of opium, and later it also permitted its cultivation until a nationalist backlash stopped it again in 1906. Until after World War II foreign powers enjoyed privileged status in China.
As a direct response to China’s defeat and the “unequal treaties” it was forced to sign, the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan banned opium in 1846 and strictly enforced the law. It appears that the prime motivation was a determination that Japan should not follow in China’s footsteps. Japan then embarked in an anti-opium campaign that lasted for for than a century. Penalties for marijuana in Japan are also notorioustly tough. Not sure why.
Job security.
Because the Elites in their society have deemed it so.
They have different types of government.
Thats what makes other countries- other countries.
I think it just messes with their ideal of a harmonious, confucian society. That, and no one in SE Asia is lobbying for more liberal drug laws, because they just discovered individual liberties about fifty years ago.