The drug debate in Japan (2018)

“Most Japanese people see cannabis as a subculture of Japan but they’re wrong. For thousands of years, cannabis has been at the very heart of Japanese culture,” Japan’s leading expert on cannabis, Takayasu Junichi, told the Asia Pacific Journal in an interview. Japan almost certainly has higher drug use and significantly higher overdose deaths than the government claims publicly

Indeed, stimulants are so deeply Japanese that methamphetamine was invented in Tokyo.

Source: www.opendemocracy.net