South Korea bans its own hemp under American pressure

In July 1970 South Korea criminalised its own hemp, closing a thirteen-year loophole at American urging.^[1] The law then sat almost unused for four years — until the day it was turned on the country’s pop stars.^[1]

The loophole America hated

The 1957 Narcotics Act banned only imported “Indian marijuana”.^[1][2] Home-grown cannabis stayed legal, and from the early 1960s it sold openly around the American bases as “happy smoke”.^[1] In 1966 the United States Forces Korea command asked Seoul to remove the loophole, and kept asking: American military arrests for marijuana rose from eight in 1966 to 635 in 1969.^[1] Korea added hemp’s active ingredient to a habit-forming drugs bill in 1968, then let the bill sleep for two years.^[1]

Two events on 8 June 1970 woke it up. Washington announced troop cuts for Korea, and the JoongAng Ilbo reported university students smoking marijuana in secret clubs.^[1] The next morning every newspaper agreed marijuana had become a problem.^[1] The Korea Times blamed the legal vacuum for friction between the allies: the Americans had asked a province to tighten control of marihuana and pressed the health ministry to hurry the dormant bill through; the Korean-language press dwelt on the students instead.^[1] The bill passed in mid-July.^[1]

A law that slept in the camp towns

For the next four years almost every marijuana arrest reported in the press happened in the American camp towns, not the universities — a sign, the record suggests, that the students’ guilt was exaggerated and the law’s true target the soldiers.^[1] Musicians, artists and students smoking at home never realised the plant had become illegal.^[1] That ignorance set up the December 1975 roundup, when prosecutors suddenly enforced the law beyond the bases and more than eighty entertainers were arrested within a month.^[3]

What came next

The Cannabis Control Act of 1976 banned the plant in all forms with prison terms, and folded into the single Narcotics Control Act in 2000.^[2] The irony outlived the crackdown: the law Washington had pressured Seoul to pass became the instrument for expelling American-influenced youth culture from public life.^[1] The South Korea profile follows the story to medical opening.