With Popular Singer-songwriter Ryo Aska Appearing In Court On Drug Charges On Thursday, We Examine The Darker Side Of Substance Abuse Some kid shot up a dose again tonight Pushed back by his other self Even if you were to buy your dream You need self-control No one talks about hopes and dreams All that's there is something better, something new, a better way The name is "Kicks Street" - the city of desire - - Lyrics from "Kicks Street" (1998), Ryo Aska [continues 2703 words]
By ROBERT SHARPE Arlington, Virginia Regarding the Aug. 7 article "Curbs afoot as narcotic quasi-legal herbs slip through regulatory cracks": The increased use of synthetic cannabinoids is an unintended side effect of the war on natural marijuana. Consumers are turning to potentially toxic drugs made in China and sold as research chemicals before they are repackaged as legal incense. Expanding the drug war will only increase criminal justice costs during an economic downturn. Chemists will tweak formulas to stay one step ahead of the law and two steps ahead of the drug tests. New versions of synthetic drugs won't be safer. Misguided efforts to protect children from drugs are putting children at risk. [continues 105 words]
The use of "dappo habu" (quasi-legal herbs) that are dried and mixed with stimulants to make narcotics is spreading, and many people are ending up in hospitals for drug poisoning. Some people under the influence of the herbs, which are often smoked, have even caused traffic accidents. Figures by the Metropolitan Police Department show that increasing numbers of younger people are using them. Between Jan. 1 and May 30 alone, 100 people in Tokyo needed to be rushed to hospitals after inhaling the herbs, including 51 in their 20s and 13 under 20 years old. The youngest was a 14-year-old junior high school student, according to MPD statistics. [continues 946 words]
Regarding Hiroaki Sato's March 1 article, "What 'prohibition' has wrought": There is a middle ground between drug prohibition and blanket legalization. Switzerland's heroin maintenance program has been shown to reduce disease, death and crime among chronic users. Providing addicts with standardized doses in a clinical setting eliminates many of the problems associated with heroin use. The success of the Swiss program has inspired pilot heroin maintenance projects in Canada, Germany, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands. If expanded, prescription heroin maintenance would deprive organized crime of a core client base. This would render illegal heroin trafficking unprofitable and spare future generations addiction. [continues 133 words]
Mexican President Felipe Calderon has his hands full. The fight against powerful drug cartels has become increasingly bloody and exposed the weaknesses of his government. A turf struggle among rival gangs has escalated into a frontal assault on the government. In a subtle twist, gangs are now enlisting and paying citizens to participate in protests against the military presence in their cities. While it is fashionable to call a struggle against any social evil - say, poverty or crime - "a war," it is no exaggeration in this case. More than 6,500 people were killed in Mexico last year as a result of drug wars. It is estimated that more than 650 have died in the first two months of 2009. At first, the victims were primarily gang members fighting for control of profitable smuggling routes into the United States. Then they realized that Mexico itself was a viable market; reportedly use of cocaine in Mexico has doubled in the past four years. [continues 631 words]
NEW YORK - When I read the news that the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy "blasted the U.S.-led drug war as a failure that is pushing Latin American societies to the breaking point" (Wall Street Journal, Feb. 12), I thought: Someone is finally talking sense. I have long regarded the U.S. approach to drugs as self-righteous, overbearing and destructive. This is not the first time the U.S. "war on drugs," which President Richard Nixon started back in 1971, has been pronounced a failure. Five years ago, for example, none other than President George W. Bush's "drug czar," John Walters, admitted that the "war" was failing. Of course, Walters, a hard-nosed conservative, made it clear that the U.S. had no intention of abandoning it. Today, he insists that intensified drug-related violence in Mexico - 4,000 people killed in 2008 alone - is a sign that the U.S. war is succeeding. [continues 851 words]
WASHINGTON (Kyodo) A U.S. government report on narcotics control Friday describes Japan as a place with widespread marijuana use and one of the largest markets for methamphetamines in Asia. The 2009 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, issued by the U.S. Department of State, said that "marijuana use is widespread" in Japan while "methamphetamine abuse remains the biggest challenge" to its antinarcotics efforts. Although the report did not elaborate, its reference to marijuana use in Japan apparently reflects the recent statistical jump in cannabis-related crimes, including highly publicized cases involving sumo wrestlers and college students in the past year. [continues 296 words]
The arrest of Wakakirin, a sumo wrestler in the juryo division, on suspicion of possessing cannabis and his subsequent dismissal by the Japan Sumo Association should be a great disappointment to many sumo fans. The incident has further tarnished the image of the JSA, which is suffering from a series of scandals. The beating death in June 2007 of a teenage wrestler led to the indictment and the JSA's dismissal of the victim's stablemaster and three stablemates. Since then, cannabis-related incidents have led to the dismissal of three wrestlers from Russia - Wakanoho, who was arrested last August, and then Roho and Hakurozan, who tested positive in simplified urine tests that the JSA conducted in September. [continues 229 words]
Arrests of university students in connection with growing, possessing or selling of cannabis have continued. Students apparently have much lower inhibitions to the use of cannabis than to other narcotic or stimulant drugs. They might think that smoking marijuana is not very different from smoking tobacco or drinking alcohol. But possessing or selling marijuana is prohibited by the Cannabis Control Law. University authorities need to educate students about the law so that they will not end up having their university life ruined by arrests and indictments. [continues 260 words]
Until recently, Japan has not needed much of a drug policy, but recent headlines about "university pot busts" indicate one is overdue. Outside of Japan, marijuana arrests no longer even get space in newspapers, since access and use of marijuana is an everyday reality, unhealthy and questionable as it may be. Japan would do well to learn from the missteps in enforcement and legal policy of other countries before the problem spreads here. Japan has been traditionally intolerant of illegal drug use, yet the recent arrests of students at good universities, along with well-known sports people, make better propaganda than effective policy. The example of the U.S. where prisons in the 1990s became swamped with people convicted of drug misdemeanors is instructive. As "educational" as such well-publicized arrests may be, Japan surely does not want its prisons full of students and sports stars caught with a few marijuana seeds or a resin-filled pipe. [continues 237 words]
Regardless of my views of marijuana use, I have to say that the Nov. 19 editorial "Students and marijuana" is a sad excuse for an editorial. Yes, in Japan, smoking marijuana is a crime; in other places in the world, it is not. This is a fact, and that this law was broken by a few people is another boring, unalarming fact. I'd also like to point out another fact: Cannabis is used to treat cancer patients in many advanced nations. Are the doctors in those countries simply oblivious to "the harmful consequences of continued marijuana use?" [continues 124 words]
A Justice Ministry report released last month says the number of Cannabis Control Law violations set a record in 2006, while the amount of marijuana seized dropped to half from the previous year. Some experts fear this indicates a rise in casual mar ijuana use by a broader population. Following are basic questions and answers about cannabis in Japan: What Does the Cannabis Control Law Stipulate? Enacted in 1948, the Cannabis Control Law bans the import, export, cultivation, sales and purchase of marijuana buds and leaves. Penalties depend on the amount of marijuana involved, but violations, especially involving commercial use of pot, can lead to a 10-year prison term and Y3 million fine. [continues 860 words]
Puppet Regimes, Army Paid: Document A Japanese narcotics firm in wartime occupied China sold enough opium to nearly match the annual budget of Tokyo's puppet government in Nanjing, according to an internal company document recently discovered by The Japan Times. The 21-page document, found in an archive at the National Diet Library of Tokyo, showed opium dealer Hung Chi Shan Tang (or Hong Ji Shan Tang as it would now be spelled) sold as much as 300 million yuan worth of opium in 1941, when the annual budget of the Nanjing Government was 370 million yuan. [continues 1129 words]
Trader Allegedly Pipelined 'Secret Funds' To Tojo, Kishi, Other Tokyo Bigwigs An obscure tomb in a small graveyard at a Chiba Prefecture temple marks the final resting place of Japan's wartime "Opium King," although the site betrays nothing of this dark cloud, nor the relationship the deceased had with key historical figures. The kanji on what looks like an ordinary tombstone at Soneiji Temple in Ichikawa reads "Satomi-ke no Reii" ("Tomb of the Satomi Family"). The inscription was written by the late Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, grandfather of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, to mark the grave of Hajime Satomi, who died in 1965. [continues 1044 words]
Japan used the opium trade of Shanghai's major dealer to prop up the value of its military currency in occupied China during the war, according to a leading expert on China's wartime economy, citing a former secret document. The latest finding in the document on the Japanese-run opium firm Hung Chi Shan Tang, now kept in the National Diet Library, reveals Japan used opium to gain economic hegemony over Chiang Kai-shek's yuan-based legal tender in the 1940s, using it to bolster the military "gunpyo" scrip, said Hideo Kobayashi, a professor at Waseda University in Tokyo. [continues 346 words]
A newly discovered document on wartime Japan's Shanghai-based opium dealer shows the Tokyo government was deeply engaged in the trade to make money off Chinese addicts. But Japan was not the only state involved in drug-trafficking. It was just a latecomer. The colonial governments of Britain, Portugal, Holland and France had all heavily depended on opium-related revenues from areas of Asia under their control in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. According to Harumi Goto, an associate professor at Chiba University, opium revenues accounted for 10 percent to 50 percent of the fiscal budgets of many colonial governments in Asia, including the British rulers of India, Hong Kong and Singapore, the Portuguese ruling Macau, the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina. [continues 311 words]
Three men have been indicted for allegedly smuggling into Japan about 46,000 tablets of Ecstasy, police said Wednesday. Takami Mitsumoto, 33, Shoichi Sasaki, 37, and Makoto Abe, 52, were arrested last month by the Metropolitan Police Department and Tokyo Customs over the fourth-largest amount of Ecstasy seized in a single case in Japan, the MPD said. The haul has a street value of around 180 million yen. The MPD said it was the largest bust under its jurisdiction. The Tokyo District Public Prosecutor's Office indicted the three last week for illegally importing drugs. [continues 133 words]
WASHINGTON -- Three years after the Bush administration led a remarkably quick and bold military operation to overthrow the Taliban regime, how are things going in Afghanistan? The short answer is that there has been considerable progress. But that is largely because things were so bad under the Taliban, not because they are good now. And unfortunately, the current "security-lite" strategy being followed by the United States and its partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization does not inspire confidence that Afghanistan will soon do better. [continues 867 words]
MORIOKA, Iwate Pref. (Kyodo) The Morioka District Court has revealed that police submitted false information to obtain a search warrant for a man they had suspected of drug use, it was learned Tuesday. The Tono branch of the district court on Sept. 13 found the man guilty of using drugs, but warned in its ruling that the submission of the fictitious report by the Iwate Prefectural Police was "likely to be highly illegal." Police delivered the report to the court when seeking approval to take a urine sample from the man and a warrant to search his car. [continues 148 words]
Thank you for publishing Doug Bandow's outstanding May 16 article, "U.S. drug laws threaten public health." (http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?eo20040516db.htm) I'd like to add that U.S. antimarijuana laws are counterproductive. By keeping marijuana as a criminalized product, we often expose marijuana users to sellers of more dangerous drugs such as heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine. Most marijuana users are interested only in marijuana and no other recreational drugs. However, they are often offered free samples of other, much more dangerous drugs by marijuana sellers. Thus the "gateway effect" is caused by marijuana criminalization policies -- not marijuana itself. My advice to Japan and the rest of the world: Carefully observe U. S. drug policy, then do the opposite. We're lost. KIRK MUSE Mesa, Arizona [end]
