I have a few friends who are from Africa and Asia who are in their 20s and compared to my friends from the US, Canada, and even Netherlands, they are much more “straight-laced”. They believe the typical propaganda about drugs without looking at a balanced view and think that weed is a hard drug but alcohol isn’t a drug at all.
I have noticed a trend that the less developed a country is, generally people will be more indoctrinated by drug propaganda perhaps because there’s little attempt to educate them better. What is the cause of this, is it religious belief which is higher in non-Western cultures or something to do with poverty?
I don’t know about the others, but with China, one theory is that the nation and culture is particularly sensitive to drugs due to the history of things such as the Opium War and opium-related exploitation by Western powers.
It’s not a stigma in some countries, so much as something that will get you severely punished if not executed. The potential fallacy is whether the man on the street has negative attitudes because of the law, or the law follows peoples’ attitudes.
It’s not less developed necessarily either, Singapore is a very modern country with draconian drug laws. Japan has some strict attitudes though no capital charges for trafficking.
Well, there is - in Taiwan, for instance, drug trafficking is punishable by the death penalty. I’m not aware of anyone in the United States or Western Europe ever being executed for a drug charge alone.
In Muslim countries there is a clear cultural aspect. In some other countries it may be more political, more about a totalatarian government maintaining control.
Law and culture are not necessarily synonymous, especially in non-democratic societies. Even if it’s broadly true that Eastern cultures tend to be less tolerant of drug use, it may be impossible to generalize as to why. I’ll also just note that the Mormons in Utah are about as Western as one gets, and they don’t even believe in coffee.
In America there is a lot of excess and frankly hedonism where if you have the money drug use can be a fun, consequence free pass time. I think in poorer countries spending money on things like drugs is largely frowned upon because any money earned could improve your station in life, it’s not just the legal/punishment aspect.
Was it Thailand, the Philippines, or both I remember watching a program before it was made illegal a huge number of citizens were using amphetamines, possibly even methamphetamines. The interesting thing about the program I watched though was how for a lot of these people it wasn’t so much about getting high as it was having the energy to work 2-3 jobs so they could get ahead.
That’s not unique to Thailand or the Philippines. That’s how it is for a lot of my clients here in the US who use meth. In Los Angeles, housing prices are so far out of pace with wages that people have to work multiple jobs to keep any kind of roof over their family’s heads. And we’re not talking about desk jobs; we’re talking hard manual labor 16 hours a day, swing shifts and changing schedules so you can’t sleep at regular intervals. A little meth sprinkled in your coffee can keep you sharp, or so they tell me. They’ve held on to these jobs for years in some cases, so I’m inclined to believe them.
Drug use can also be a way of self-medicating for trauma or mental illness. Most of my clients were victims of some type of abuse. Most of them are under extreme stress now. Some have to make the choice between staying with their abuser or ending up on the streets.
And no, it’s not without consequence. Granted, we don’t execute addicts here, but we do lock them up, take away their kids, or leave them to die in a gutter if they can’t afford help.
Your broad-brush characterization of drug use in America as hedonistic reveals extreme ignorance. For some of us, yes; drinking beer and smoking weed is a fun way to rebel, to unwind, to experiment with consciousness. (Typically meth isn’t the drug of choice for those kids.) But for the poor, it tends to be a very different picture.
South Korea takes as hard a line on pot as any country I know of. A lot of this is rooted in Cold War-era policies of mollifying Uncle Sam (Trump is highly regarded by the extreme right here). Conversely, Korea is a drinker’s paradise.