Japan's Up and Coming Magic Mushroom Ban June 6

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mjshroomer
Sage

Registered: 07/21/99
Posts: 13,774
Loc: gone with my shrooms

Japan's Up and Coming Magic Mushroom Ban June 6

#649706 - 05/28/02 01:14 PM (24 years, 3 months ago)

From the Seattle Post Intelligencer, may 27, 2002

TOKYO - Enthusiasts admit it's not the taste that keeps them gobbling
the
shriveled, brown mushrooms. They're so bitter that many can only choke
them
down with orange juice or yogurt.
The allure is the hallucinogen within, so potent that the fungi are
outlawed in most countries with the likes of cocaine and heroin.
"It doesn't taste good, but I like to get high," 19-year-old student
Wataru
Kanbe said after eating a handful of "magic mushrooms" at a recent
open-air
concert. Best of all, he added with a glassy-eyed stare, doing so is
completely legal.
Not much longer.
Alarmed by the soaring popularity of hallucinogenic mushrooms and
their
sometimes toxic side effects, Japan's Health Ministry is finally
plugging
the legal loophole that has allowed them to be sold openly and lawfully
by
trendy shops, street vendors and mail-order companies advertising in
magazines.
The crackdown - which takes effect June 6 - will slap a maximum
seven-year
prison term on magic mushroom possession, putting it on par with the
penalty
for cocaine possession.
While the appeal of the mushrooms reflects changing Japanese attitudes
toward drugs, it also highlights the government's increasingly
desperate
battle against them.
Japan has carefully nurtured its hard-line reputation, from leveling
life
sentences on heroin traffickers to arresting former Beatle Paul
McCartney in
1980 when he stepped off the plane in Tokyo with a bag of marijuana.
But a 1990 overhaul of the drug law overlooked one point. It banned
the
psychoactive drugs psilocybin and psilocin, but not the mushrooms that
naturally produce them.
It didn't take long for entrepreneurs to start hawking the psychedelic
fungi to curious teens and rebellious hipsters in search of a "legal
high."
So-called head shops mushroomed overnight in trendy Tokyo
entertainment
districts, selling packs for 1,800 to 3,000 yen ($13 to $23) a pop.
They're
all laid out in fancy glass display cases.
Most are imported from the Netherlands, where they are grown on farms.
But
even hand-picked, wild "liberty cap" toadstools from Scotland turn up
for
$20 a gram.
"You can find them anywhere," said Hideo Eno at the Health Ministry's
narcotics division.
The ministry said there were at least 11 species of magic mushrooms -
technically classified as poisonous plants and not drugs - being sold
in
Japan. As long as they were not labeled as food, that was permitted.
Takahito Watanabe, manager of PsychoPompos, a closet-sized head shop
brazenly advertising itself with a marijuana-leaf signboard, said his
desiccated mushrooms were for display purposes only. "Or use as good
luck
charms," he said.
The Health Ministry has no statistics on the size of the magic
mushroom
market or how many Japanese use them. But their popularity is hinted at
by
sales at a chain of three stores owned by mushroom magnate Muneo
Ogishi. He
claims more than 3,000 people stock up every month, mostly people in
their
20s.
The increase in use is also underlined by the increase in the number
of
people hospitalized for overdosing, from one person in 1997 to 38 in
2000 -
not huge numbers but enough to demand action, Eno said.
"Young people are curious. They say it's fun and safe. But really it
contains a dangerous narcotic," he said.
Users say the effect of magic mushrooms is like being sealed in a
cocoon of
euphoria where street lights look like prisms and neon blurs into
rainbows.
But the mushrooms can also trigger nausea and sudden fits of paranoia
or
panic.
Mushrooms are not considered addictive, but government officials view
them
as a gateway to experimentation with other drugs.
Narcotics use in Japan peaked during the economic boom of the 1980s,
but
has been on the rise again. Except for a dip in 1998, arrests for drug
offenses rose consistently from 1995 to 2000. Last year, police took in
a
record haul of recreational drugs, seizing 1,753 pounds of marijuana
and
confiscating 118,000 tablets of Ecstasy, a 40 percent increase from the
year
before.
The changing mores were underlined in a recent government poll that
said
nearly 20 percent of high school students nationwide think it should be
legal for them to use drugs if they wish.
"Drug abuse is on the rise and legalized magic mushrooms aren't
helping,"
said Chikashi Okutsu, director of Asia Pacific Addiction Institute, a
Tokyo
drug abuse treatment center.
He said mushrooms are particularly dangerous for inexperienced users
"who
don't know what they're doing."

Sent to Mjshroomer by

Larry Johnson
Foreign Desk Editor
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
101 Elliott Avenue West
Seattle, WA 98119-4220
Phone: 206-448-8035
Fax: 206-448-8166

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