





●Introduction

Smoking marijuana is illegal in Japan. You would lose all the credibility and social status that you established in your life once you got arrested by police for smoking pot in Japan. You would be treated almost like a felon if you got caught by police for using illegal drugs. I grew up in Japan, but now I live in the US where recreational marijuana is legal in some states. When those states legalized recreational marijuana, I could not wrap my head around why it could be legal. I checked some statistics and wrote my opinion about the legalization of recreational marijuana in the US below.

List of state and district where marijuana is fully legalized.

Drugs have been causing serious problems in the US. In 2017, more than 70,000 people died from overdose of drugs. The death toll has been increasing since 1999. But, this country fully legalized marijuana including the recreational usage in the following 10 states and the District of Columbia as of April 2019 according to DISA.

・Alaska ・Washington ・Oregon ・California ・Nevada ・Colorado ・Michigan ・Vermont ・Massachusetts ・Maine ・District of Columbia

Many analysts say that recreational marijuana became legal because the state government wanted to collect more taxes from the drug. I believe it’s true and the government may have needed more money to run the government after the global financial crisis in 2008. But, there are obviously many problems caused by drugs. Homelessness is one of the big problems caused by drugs. (Please see the page below if you are interested in the relation between drug addicts and homelessness.)

Some people argue that the drugs that create critical problems are not marijuana, but other drugs such as cocaine and heroin. However, from my Japanese viewpoint, drugs are drugs and they are the same. I am brainwashed by Japanese education system and am forced to believe that non-medical use of drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, and heroin is basically all harmful to your health.

When I was in school we learned about the Opium Wars in China. The British flooded the Chinese market with illegal opium creating hundreds of thousands of addicts and substantial economic losses. After China’s defeat, the Chinese government was forced to enter the inequitable treaties imposed by the British Empire. The Tokugawa shogunate, Japanese governing body in that era, banned opium in 1846 and strictly enforced the law. Japan did not want to repeat China’s example. This made a big impression on me and since it was widely taught in Japan, I am sure I wasn’t the only one who equated drugs and chaos. Some people say marijuana is a gateway drug and it can be the beginning of destroying yourself. Therefore, it was very difficult for me to understand why some states in the US could justify legalizing marijuana.

Annual prevalence of cannabis use

I checked statistics at UNODC website to see how marijuana consumptions in the US and Japan are different from other G20 countries. The figure below shows the percentage of the population aged 15–64 who have consumed cannabis at least once in the past survey year by country. The estimated percentages were not obtained every year in the UNODC survey for some countries, so the year of data ranged from 2003 to 2017. China is calculated by averaging the data from China Hong Kong SAR, Macao SAR, and Taiwan Province of China.









The USA has high cannabis usage rate at about 17% of the population, Japan is only 0.3%. It seems only a small percentage of Japanese people consume marijuana. It’s amazing how low the drug consumption is among Asian countries. It seems China, Japan, South Korea all have very strict regulations against drug use.

It was interesting to learn about the difference in prevalence of marijuana use by country while researching this article. I would like to research further why Japan is so strict about drug use in my next article about drugs.





