The story
On 3 December 1975 South Korean prosecutors arrested three folk singers for smoking marijuana. Within a month more than eighty entertainers had been taken in. The country’s strict cannabis law, passed the following year, grew out of that winter, and the winter itself grew out of a five-year campaign against the way young people looked and sounded.
A campaign against youth
Under President Park Chung-hee the state had been policing youth culture since 1970, when a month-long drive went after long hair, short skirts and experimental art.
| Year | Measure |
|---|---|
| 1970 | First yearly crackdown on long hair and miniskirts |
| October 1971 | Almost 50,000 young men given forced haircuts in a month |
| 1973 | Long hair on men made an offence |
| 1975 | A “healthy song” required on every record; over 100 songs banned |
| Summer 1975 | The authorities film an anti-marijuana picture |
By 1974 Korean folk, rock and pop had pushed the older trot off the top of the charts for the first time. Park warned that young people smoking marijuana would “bring ruin to our country”.
The arrests
The crackdown on smokers began late in November 1975; prosecutors had planned to arrest several dozen. On 3 December they took in three folk singers, among them Lee Jang-hee. The rock musician Shin Joong-hyun and Kim Jung-ho followed, then members of a band and a film director. Newspapers printed cartoons and “psychedelic” pictures to teach readers the signs of a user.
Most of those arrested were not sent to prison. The Entertainers’ Association banned them from recording and performing, some for life, and magazines reported that some were confined in mental institutions as addicts. Bans on more than 200 Western pop songs followed.
The law that came after
Hemp had been an ordinary Korean crop: it was grown in every province as late as the 1930s, and on 9,000 hectares in the late 1950s. A law of 1957 had forbidden only imported “Indian marijuana”. The Cannabis Control Act of 1976 banned the plant as a drug in every form. In 2000 it was folded into a single narcotics law, with the ban unchanged.
In February 1976 Park spoke against “degenerate fashions introduced from foreign countries”, and that July his culture minister told an American newspaper that foreign influence would have no future part in Korean culture.
Why the index moves a year later
The arrests were made before the ban on the plant existed in its later form, and they changed no statute, so they are recorded as context. The score for South Korea falls with the Cannabis Control Act of 1976, which made possession and use crimes punishable with prison.[1][2]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for South Korea here.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.