I have to keep reminding myself that China’s drug policy has its origin in historical trauma and the opinions of its people reflects that. They really think weed is like heroin or something it’s tragic.
Gonna go smoke some weed about it
I have to keep reminding myself that China’s drug policy has its origin in historical trauma and the opinions of its people reflects that. They really think weed is like heroin or something it’s tragic.
Gonna go smoke some weed about it
Alcohol and Nicotine both stimulate economic activity (Spending/Drinking and Smoking/Working). Weed is so demonized because it makes the user “lazy” aka content and happy, which has no economic value.
Capitalists only begrudgingly half-accepted weed once they realized the sheer profit and taxes that were being missed out on due to the popularity of the drug. It’s pacifying and chilling-out effects now also have a secondary benefit, like Fentanyl and other opiates, of keeping the masses subdued and not revolting. That wasn’t as big of a concern when things were better economically and socially, so there was more latitude for punishing weed to enforce productivity and economic growth. Now things are going to shit so weed has become a lot more functional and acceptable.
For a bourgie this is the order of preference for the state of their prole populations:
Best: Working hard, spending hard (Alcohol / Nicotine / Amphetamines / Cocaine / SSRIs) - these drugs are legal or rarely enforced
Next Best: Drugs for self-reflection, religious experience, growth, partying, overcoming trauma, artistic endeavors (Shrooms / Acid / MDMA / Ayahuasca / etc) - OK for “vacation” on occasion, they can be weaponized and used to increase productivity like micro-dosing acid. Occasional use is OK or even encouraged, continual repeated use is frowned upon.
Mid: “Lazy” and subdued, not generating economic activity but not actively causing unrest (Weed / Fentanyl / Opiates) - these drugs are demonized but still pushed on impoverished populations to keep them under control
2nd to worst: Dead / OD / Heavily Addicted to the point of being useless at anything else (Fentanyl but more of it / Alcohol but more of it / Crack / Other Hard Drugs) - whoops we pushed too hard
Worst: Rioting / Revolting - Somebody drug these folks!
Things in China right now are pretty good materially and getting better every day, so there’s more emphasis on punishing “laziness” drugs that subdue the user. If conditions get sharply worse in China and civil unrest becomes more common, you may see these drugs tolerated more openly as more of the population resorts to self-medicating to deal with it.
I’m not even saying the bourgies are purposefully doing this, these populations are drugging themselves based on the conditions they find themselves in. The bourgies do control drug policy of the state though, which does have an effect, and there is a reason that the US government is the #1 drug dealer on Earth. They are also the #1 punisher of drug users. That’s the two sides of the vice by which they grip us.
Liberals and normies often hear the “US is the #1 drug dealer on Earth” fact and disregard it (or accept it but don’t truly internalize it) because they think “that can’t be right, that same entity hates drugs so much! they are famously cruel at cracking down on drugs.” They do not understand dialectics to realize that the US government purposefully contains this contradiction as a method of control. The farthest they will ever get is to call the US government “hypocritical” for this contradictory policy, as if it’s some character flaw and not a purposeful strategy of tension.
Weed is demonised because of American racism, and their brain worms getting exported. People are equally not working on vodka, but you can’t pretend beer is the brown and blacks polluting the white nation
Becoming a send-em-all-back guy but only for Meopotamians. Not Iraqi people either, only the OGs
So weed is tightly controlled in China because of racism? So are you saying they are more racist than the current West is since they are more tightly controlling? Or is there another explanation?
Also, I didn’t claim alcohol makes people work better. It makes them spend better.
Partly because of American racism. The crackdown on weed specifically began wordwide in the Nixon era as a result of Nixon needing a thing to rally around, the west went along because of the big hegemon and thus a precedent is set. Social conservates doesn’t want to let go of the prohibition because of associated stereotypes, the now existing links to criminality, and just because they’re social conservatives.
There are so many stores catering to potheads.
So your answer is yes, China is slower to progress on racial issues and is more racist. Got it. No materialist explanation outside of that
I don’t know a way to respond to this that isn’t just calling you names. Go back and redo whatever train of thought lead you this post.
the train of thought known as dialectical materialism instead of “america mind controlled China to be racist but forgot to un-mind control them after America got less racist I guess, since China is incapable of making any social progress as fast as the west”
Small business tyrants operating pizza parlors and other takeout food and snack dispensing services strongly disagree, as does the cannabis industry. Weed can and is integrated into capitalist value extraction wherever it is sufficiently normalized under a capitalist economic system.
All value ascribed to particular drugs is largely ideological. They obviously do have their own distinct neuropharmacology and other observable material effects, but at the end of a day, for almost anything that has a history of widespread recreational and therapeutic use, patterns of usage and the context in which that use happens matter more than the properties of that substance itself. And societal attitudes towards the drug are almost fully uncoupled from either of that.
Objectively, a drug is a tool that can be used or misused. Societally, this approach goes largely unrecognized and is instead repaced with mythology and poorly understood heuristics, to the detriment of everybody.
Expanding upon that. Instead of imagining legal and illegal markets that keep separate like the liberal public-private spheres of life dichotomy, think about the dialectical (not trying to be jargony this is literally synthesis) relationship between organized crime and capitalist institutions. How come the intelligence guys who love forever wars in places that coincidentally have a lot of dope fields happen to belong to the faction of internationalist capital that makes pharmaceuticals? The contras smuggling coke, the Afghan warlords, the Hmong opium, all with CIA support. The illicit drug market isn’t just a good way to raise funds for US security state operations, controlling it has real above-the-surface political effects.