Here we go again. The Weed Blog was last week the latest to repeat the urban legend that cannabis is legal in North Korea. Earlier this year, the same click-bait nonsense was heard on a YouTube video produced by TopTrending.com. The mis-informed line goes like this (in the Weed Blog's gushy prose): "North Korea doesn’t consider marijuana a drug at all, and is completely legal in the country. [Sic] That's right. I can repeat that: marijuana is completely legal in the country of North Korea." You can repeat it all you want, but that doesn't make it true. It's an absurd irony that probably the most cannabis-unfriendly country on Earth has won a rep as a free zone where the stuff is legal. How did this all get started?
This rumor is largely the work of travel blogger Darmon Richter, who wrote an account in 2013, “On Smoking Weed in North Korea.” He claimed to have been taken along on a "staff outing" by his tour guides in the port city of Rason, where he found a "veritable mountain of marijuana" on sale in a market stall. He claimed that in North Korea, the stuff goes by the name of ip tambae, or "leaf tobacco," is legal, and widely smoked as a tobacco substitute.
The Guardian newspaper examined these claims and found that ip tambae, or ipdambae, is a "potpourri-like mixture of herbs and uncured tobacco leaves"—definitely not cannabis, which is indeed illegal in North Korea. The record was set straight by Matthew Reichel, director of the Pyongyang Project, which brings tourists to the ultra-closed country. "If you smoke that stuff it'll smell weird but it won't get you high," he told The Guardian. (Richter did a follow-up piece after The Guardian story, in which he conceded he'd got it wrong.)
Industrial hemp is grown, and feral hemp plants grow along the highways, as in Nebraska. But as every cornhusker knows, that stuff won't get you high either. Another thing North Korea has in common with the US Midwest, alas, is a plague of methamphetamine use. If personal users are being sent to the firing squad for meth rather than pot, that's only because there isn't any pot. And tourists (needless to say!) are closely controlled by handlers every minute of their time on the ground. Going to North Korea for the cannabis is a guaranteed bad trip.
A few years back, rubes got taken in by an Internet hoax, claiming that Sweden had legalized cannabis. It was posted all over Facebook by people who didn't bother to check out whether it was true or not. It was a total fabrication. But at least it was plausible. North Korea? Really? I'm tempted to ask what you guys have been smoking...
Graphic via The Weed Blog
Comments
North Korean ganja? Smells more like 'fake news' than dank buds
Yeah, except all of this is based on unsubstantiated "reports." High Times cites Radio Free Asia and British tabloid The Sun. Both reports name the special economic zone of Rason as the place where these Chinese "tourists" are loading up. RFA cites unnamed "sources inside North Korea," who say the government encouraged cultivation of "yeoksam" (assumed to be cannabis) to address a cooking oil shortage in the 1980s. So it was grown for seed oil—not smoking. Even if this is really cannabis, it sounds to us like hemp—not marijuana. That is, a virtually THC-free industrial crop. And we all know there is plenty of that in North Korea. Otherwise, how would the "tourists" be getting it across the border into China? That has got to be one of the most tightly controlled borders on Earth, and while industrial hemp is legal in China, HT notes that marijuana most definitely is not.
The Sun goes a sleazy one better, sporting a photo of a phat, resinous indica plant—but it's just a Getty file photo, obviously not taken in North Korea. And The Sun's source? It links back to the same thinly-sourced RFA story. The usual Internet shell game.
Whatever these Chinese tourists think they are buying, or whatever they try to pass the herb off as to their own buyers back home in China, we doubt very much it contains any THC whatsoever. And Google brings back little information on "Yeoksam," except that there is a neighborhood of that name in Seoul, South Korea. (We'll bet it's the equivalent of Hempstead, Long Island.)
At least HT does try to discourage would-be cannabis tourists from visting the DPRK to get high, pointing to the complete lack of political freedom there. But we continue to be from Missouri on this story. If yeoksam is cannabis at all, it is almost certainly rope, not dope.
Damon Richter trying to pull a fast one?
The indicated link goes to a page (also seemingly gone from the site but available on the Wayback Machine), which links to multiple sources on the question and states flatly: "I’m happy to bow down to superior knowledge, and accept what the experts are telling me: Cannabis is not legal in North Korea."
Why has this been removed from your website, Damon?
We want to know.
Richter responds on North Korean pot question
Darmon Richter statement on North Korean pot claims