Is Japan becoming a 'drug heaven?' › Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

Is Japan becoming a 'drug heaven?' › Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion:

Aside from the fact that Japan is already a drug heaven with alcohol and tobacco addiction with a probably under-reported 2% alcoholism rate and a 30% smoking rate, the country already has its legal drugs of choice. Who needs something as expensive as marijuana?

This article is exploding with rumor, fear mongering, scapegoating, and outright misinformation.

“People toke up openly on campus,” the magazine hears from one Keio student. “It’s not just a matter of five or 10 people.”

Now that's reliable journalism.

A club employee in Roppongi seems to confirm Friday’s worst fears. “Lately, it’s not unusual to see college students toking up. Smoking marijuana at clubs and at raves is just everyday stuff now.”

Our worst fears realized, and in such a reliable fashion, a club employee in Roppongi...

“Many of the sellers handling stimulants and other narcotics are Iranian,” says an investigator. “Many of them here illegally.”

The stuff they sell used to come primarily from China, but a crackdown there stimulated the forging of fresh procurement connections in Europe and Canada.

Here it is, the foreign threat. This is something that happened in the US, too, scapegoating minorities for a domestic social problem that effects everyone.

“One gram of marijuana costs about 6,000 yen,” a police source tells Friday. “It’s easy for young people to get. And marijuana is likely to be a kind of gateway to the use of other drugs.”

Ahh.. "the gateway drug argument"... that seems to have lost its logical or scientific foundations a while ago. The Rand Corporation's study in 2002 found:

A new study by the RAND Drug Policy Research Center casts doubt on claims that marijuana acts as a "gateway" to the use of cocaine and heroin, challenging an assumption that has guided U.S. drug policies since the 1950s.

And where do kids get access to 6,000 yen to buy drugs? Sounds like a parenting problem to me.

The media could focus on a constructive confrontation of real social problems like suicide, violence in the home, education, the country's chronic inability to adhere to the guidelines of the Kyoto Treaty, or the very real threat that the country will not be able to feed itself because of the rapidly rising mean age of farmers. Instead we get this. I wouldn't think anything about it if this were the first such nonsense I had come in contact with, but there it isn't. For example, there were a couple of radio newscasters on the other day talking about "flashbacks." A word that they used several times in association with this story and the dire effects of marijuana.

W. Virginia town shrugs at poorest health ranking - Yahoo! News

W. Virginia town shrugs at poorest health ranking - Yahoo! News

Poor ole WV. They always get it in the teeth, don't they?

Japanese and American Culture: Proposition 8

I teach a class this morning on Japanese and American Culture. Last week our theme was sexuality and gender, this week our topic is religion. It seems that these issues are very closely linked, so it has been interesting for me and the students to look at how religion, sexuality and gender are so strongly linked. This morning we about a DVD of a show that aired in the US called "30 Days," where a Christian man went to live with a Muslim family for 30 days. There was no specific discussion of sexuality in Islam, but the fact that men and women wear different clothes, pray differently, and customs regarding the sexes were lightly touched upon. There was absolutely no mention of sexuality in Christianity, nor was there any discussion of Christian values regarding interactions between men and women. Those issues were beyond the scope of the program, I'm sure, but it led us to touch on the recent elections where California changed their constitution to prohibit same sex marriages and the role of Christianity.

I mentioned the absurdity of this kind of ruling before, and it strikes me that the logic of the religious fear mongers in this case is similar to that of their predecessors when they outlawed interracial marriage until 1967. I quote briefly the longer quote below found on the Organization of American Historians site, "Almighty God created the races, white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix (16)."

Here is the logic that the Commonwealth of Virgina used to condemn interracial marriage. The logic that influenced so many Californians was, "Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God, and the formation of families is central to the Creator’s plan for His children..."

If I'm one of this guy's children, I'm going to the courthouse and change my records.

I encourage you to look at the OAH site and read about how marriage laws change. This too will pass.

Unhappy People Watch Lots More TV | LiveScience

Unhappy People Watch Lots More TV | LiveScience

Here's a study that looks really comprehensive, but leaves alot to be desired. 30,000 American adults surveyed between 1975 and 2006, now that is a long-range study. It says that people who watch lots of television, which they define as being 25 hours per week average, are unhappy, and happy people watch an average of 19 hours.

I watch an average of 0 hours, and I'm blissful. My guess is that the more you consume the rubbish that is on offer, the less time you spend living.

Turn that off and hug a tree!

With a sigh of relief and tears in my eyes...

I am proud to be an American today. I spent the last eight years completely disillusioned with the country, to the point of becoming clinical about it. Today I look at the election results, and I am happier than I have been in a decade about the events in my home country.

The one disturbing result is "Proposition 8" passing in California, which eliminates the right of same-sex couples to marry. At the time of this writing, 5,387,939 adult people who voted for the proposition are deciding for 26,937,431 (My calculation based on Census Bureau numbers) other adult people who did not vote for the proposition how they should live their lives. Absurd.