Andrew Gallimore

Woo.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

But then at the end of the Second World War, when they had stockpiles of this methamphetamine and it started to spill down into the black market, basically, and large, very large numbers of people became addicted to meth.

And they were actually in Osaka in, I think, around 1954.

I forget the exact year, but in one year, the police raided, I think, around 50 meth labs.

in one city, operated by one or two people, like mom-and-pop operation.

It's like Breaking Bad, right?

Like you imagine meth labs in Arizona or something now.

This was happening in Japan in the 1950s, and it scared the shit out of the Japanese government because they were a defeated nation.

They thought that it was the end of their civilization, and they thought that meth addiction was the symptom.

It was going to actually...

perhaps catalyzed the end of the Japanese.

It was an existential threat to the Japanese civilization.

So they hit it hard legally.

And so now when Japanese law, they're really focused on cannabis because of probably the American influence and meth.

But psychedelics, most people in Japan probably don't know much about.

There's a psychedelic subculture in Japan.

There are ayahuasca circles in Japan that operate in a gray area of the law.

It's not explicitly illegal.