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'Parasite' actor Lee Sun-kyun found dead amid investigation over drug allegations
(www.koreatimes.co.kr)
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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The way Korea vilifies recreational drug use is completely absurd and likely led to this.
I love traveling in Korea (and Japan), but have a hard time convincing myself to go back to a place with such fundamentally unethical policies in place.
What are you, Portuguese?
The only drug specifically mentioned in the article is cannabis lol. As such, no not Portuguese, but I am from somewhere much more progressive than Portugal when it comes to cannabis regulations. Can a random tourist even go buy a joint legally from a store in Portugal yet? If any adult can't go buy it from a store legally without any further justification, then it isn't actually legal.
Only two options: Canada or Uruguay
Edit: probably should have checked the instance lol
I’m in Michigan in the US. We are not under prohibition anymore
Unfortunately the only countries who have ended prohibition are Canada and Uruguay.
In Michigan you can legally get tortured (solitary confinement) by the (federal) government for merely possessing small amounts of cannabis.
Sure but they aren’t.
Selling isn't legal in Portugal but all (nondistribution) drug use has been decriminalized
Decriminalization has serious issues for safe medicines like cannabis, but I prefer it to legalization for opiates personally
I also prefer the actual legalization of all drugs. Decriminalization is barely better than prohibition with inconsistent purity and implicit support of organized crime.
Edit: Oh sorry, I misread. I'm curious as to why you support decriminalization but not legalization. Also, aren't many forms of opiates already legal when sourced correctly? Like for medical applications and stuff?
I can see why they vilify it. Drugs straight deteriorate some societies to the point it’s irrecoverable for centuries (see China and opium). Sucks about the loss of human life over it either way.
The alternative isn't to embrace it... We all understand the negative consequences from substance abuse. Their comment was about the method being used to deal with it, some methods are better than others
Police questioned him for 19 fucking hours over his personal recreational drug use. It sounds like this whole ordeal is a career death sentence in Korea, too. As far as I'm concerned atm — Korean culture, the state, and the police, killed this man through bullying and harassment. His drug use is irrelevant.
Horrible. I would think a steep fine for something like that would be enough of a deterrent for most people, and it most certainly would have changed the outcome here.
oh yeah for sure could be a reaction to the opium wars
It's never the drugs that make a society erode; it's a symptom. If you have a big drug problem in a country, most likely it's related to much bigger issues at the core. Like in the Opium Wars, it was the British Empire that basically drugged China as a means to get what they want. It's not like they discovered drugs and then just stopped doing anything else; we humans had drugs and used drugs since we know about them.
Some argue this tactic is still very much in use today, hence the fentanyl crisis, which seems to be fueled by China. It's a destabilizing tactic. That's also part of why China and other Asian countries are so strict because they know firsthand the effectiveness of literally drugging your foe to gain an advantage. This does not mean China and co do not have their own drug market; they have a pretty vivid drug scene.
Also, as an example, Japan or China, yeah, sure, you can't buy weed; they will basically curb-stop you legally. But you can drink as much alcohol as you want, smoke as much tobacco as you want, and drink as many caffeine drinks as you want. These are all recreational drugs with a much higher impact on society than weed, yet they are totally legal and accepted by everyone or are even traditional.
Except that is what did happen during Qing Dynasty's rule. You would do better by watching Nathan Rich's Epic China series, by far the most educational series/documentary on Imperial China history. I cannot think of any media outside China that has done a job as authentic and good as him, and his work has yet only covered since ancient China upto the first Opium War by 8 Nation Alliance. It is still in progress.
But they had already discovered it. They both used opium and traded opium well before the British flooded them with it. "it was a normal item of use and trade for centuries before the 1840 war"
The initial trade was only for purposes of opening up China for global trade, and to create vulnerability to exploit and colonise, like neighbour India was colonised for 200 years. Britishers consistently stated the need for "laissez faire" trade for a reason.
The reason why a second opium war happened was that the first one was merely lost, and the 8 Nation Alliance failed to fully colonise. Infact, some ports and provinces of China were given/gifted to European powers during this time, and withdrawn back after the wars.
Yes, I agree. In fact you can see this in the US today. Pharmaceutical oligarchs pushed their opium so hard, showing ads on TV, literally bribing doctors to sell it, small town pharmacies prescribing over 300 pills per resident per year.
Vast swathes of rural USA are zombie wastelands full of people just decaying because of conservative policy.
This is what winning looks like. Nobody wants to be the first one busting out the forks and spoons.
300 pills a year doesn’t seem too bad.
That is less than 1 a day.
Don’t get me wrong I agree with you in general, I just think the numbers are weird
I do believe it's something like 300 per resident of the US per year, not specific residents with prescriptions. Just illustrating quantities, in other words.
Actually, I believe it might be worse than that, but I'm not looking it up, just tried to clarify.
Yeah… that is a little different. lol
Large imports of opium to China only started in 1822, and while the 'century of humiliation' would begin ~20 years later, society was in no way 'irrecoverable', it wasn't centuries, and it wasn't because of opium.
Opium was yet another weight around the neck of Qing, but it was only a serious issue because the dominant naval power on the globe forced them to accept opium at cannon point and killed them when they refused.
Unless US aircraft carriers start bombing Korea into accepting industrial quantities of heroin, the situation isn't really comparable.
Opium was being pumped into China since 1700s, not 1822. Something tells me you are not being honest and are downplaying the singular most important tool Britishers used in something called "Opium War".
I don't want to downplay the horror of opium, but the Opium War was a war.
The reason the British went to war is because the Qing were making progress getting rid of opium. The British needed their gunships to make sure the opium stuck. It wasn't that opium was such an impossible problem to combat, it's that the British navy beat them in two wars when they tried.
The opium funnelling was a massive problem, infact the single biggest problem Qing Dynasty rulers had. Christianity was used in conjunction, and the lie of "laissez faire" Western trade was well understood. The goal was to colonise China, the way India was for 200 years, and suck the money out. The money reasoning is simple – India and China were the richest countries in the world, effectively having half of the world's wealth, because originally only three civilisations existed for thousands of years (Egyptian, Indian and Chinese).
I suggest you check Nathan Rich's Epic China series. It is incredibly detailed, far more than any historical material you could possibly find and attempt to have the slightest coherent compiling of, or whatever media/history outlets have.
it's also related to how societies are fast tracked into productivity (Caffine is a drug)