Japan

Located in the Pacific Ocean, the island country of Japan is an economic superpower, with the world's second-largest gross domestic product. An outlier in many global trends, it has never experienced the same rates of drug use as other wealthy industrialized countries. Even during its involvement in opium trafficking in the 19th and early 20th centuries, during which the opium trafficker Hoshi Hajime even became a member of the Diet (the legislature), opium usage in Japan was low, and domestic production limited to medicinal use. In the modern day, the United Nations (UN) estimates that drug use in Japan is about a third of the global average, with most of the illegal drug traffic originating in China and North Korea. Furthermore, most drug-related arrests in Japan involve amphetamines, an uncommon option as a country's most popular drug. However, in the last 10 years, drug use among teenagers and young people has steadily increased, along with the popularity and availability of marijuana and ecstasy. In 2009 marijuana arrests reached record levels, nearly double the arrests of the previous year.

In general, the popular imagination in Japan lacks the cultural distinction between “hard” and “soft” drugs that is found elsewhere. It is common in Japan to view marijuana and heroin as equally dangerous drugs and to assume that the physical and psychological effects of drugs begin immediately upon use. Similarly, marijuana laws are unusually harsh, having originated during the postwar occupation period at the behest of General MacArthur. Possession of marijuana can lead to a prison sentence of 10 years. Japan's Drug Abuse Prevention Center, established by the government in 1987 to deal with illegal drug trafficking, continues to cite “marijuana psychosis,” links between marijuana and violent crime, and other arguments that are no longer in favor even among opponents of marijuana decriminalization.

At the same time, the low incidence of drug use has occasionally led to loopholes: hallucinogenic mushrooms were not outlawed until 2002, a ban precipitated by their adoption by Japanese youth culture. Shortly thereafter, in 2007, the Pharmaceutical Affairs Law explicitly banned the manufacture, import, and sale of drugs that have the same effect as illegal narcotics, regardless of whether they are explicitly named elsewhere in the drug laws.