Prisoners would pick the plant while collecting firewood and then dry it over camp fires

Being a prisoner of war during the Korean War was uniquely brutal. More than 38 per cent of Americans taken prisoner by the North Korean side did not survive captivity – a death rate comparable to the horrific conditions of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps during the Second World War.

But amid the starvation, -40 Celsius temperatures and arbitrary executions, there was one solitary upside: Prisoners often had all the marijuana they could possibly want.

“The stuff I had, well, you didn’t give a damn whether anything happened that day,” reads an account by Jim Crombie, an American prisoner of war. “We’d pass that joint around and everybody would lie there laughing and hollering.”

He added “you’d never know you were in a POW camp.”

After Communist China joined the Korean War in October, 1950, any United Nations prisoners they captured were sent to camps along the Yalu River, the border between China and North Korea. It just so happened that the region was filled with wild cannabis.

Prisoners would pick the plant while collecting firewood and then dry it over camp fires. With Korean War POW camps lacking typical barbed wire enclosures, prisoners could also sneak out during the night to top up their stash. The pot was so plentiful that some prisoners even slept on pillows stuffed with it. By war’s end, virtually every prisoner held by the Chinese had used marijuana at least once.

“If it weren’t for the marijuana a lot more guys would have died,” U.S. prisoner Robert MacLean told an oral historian after the war. Some prisoners refused to eat, either because of depression or the staggeringly low quality of the food. Said MacLean “we’d get them as high as kites, and they’d think they were eating a T-bone steak.”

Prisoners were also subjected to near-constant communist indoctrination by the Chinese, with prisoners rewarded or punished based on whether they were exhibiting proper Marxist “spirit.” According to MacLean, communist brainwashing was particularly ineffective when the prisoners were in a haze of weed.

William Smith, a U.S. Korean War veteran, said in a 2010 oral history that several fellow prisoners became “hopheads from the word ‘go.’” Smith himself, however, abandoned weed after his first try because he found the munchies too painful. “You was already hungry. If you smoke that marijuana, that makes you that much more hungry, and we didn’t have nothing to eat,” he said.

Just like today, Communist China took a particularly hard line on drugs, blaming them for the so-called “century of humiliation” in which foreign powers had overrun an opium-addicted China.

For the most part, though, guards did not appear to realize what was going on, and wrote off any unusual behaviour as simply being Western quirks. One American prisoner, after a few too many puffs, ran panicked around a camp screaming “the Indians are coming, the Indians are coming!” According to war journalist Max Hastings, to allay suspicions from Chinese guards, fellow prisoners simply explained that he was shellshocked.

Long after the Korean War, drug usage would become closely associated with another Asian conflict. During the war in Vietnam, up to two thirds of deployed U.S. soldiers would try marijuana.

But the drug’s presence in Korea is almost complete forgotten, garnering only the occasional mention in most histories of the war. Many former prisoners, returning home to a United States still in the grip of Reefer Madness, never spoke of their exposure to the drug even to close family.

In a 2010 interview with his local paper, former prisoner Tom Nicholson admitted for the first time that he had tried pot while a prisoner in Camp Five, the primary camp for United Nations POWs.

“I’ve never told anybody that before,” the 82-year-old veteran said, before adding “it was the best stuff you’d ever want to try … it was a blessing to us.”

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