Wednesday, 12 March 2014

Did you know it's legal to smoke weed in North Korea? Dude, suddenly it all makes sense…

North Korea might not be the freest country in the world, but one little bit of freedom it does allow might qualify it to be the grooviest. Apparently it's perfectly legal to smoke weed. Seriously, dude. Like, out in the open.
I'm late to the party on this one, but Vice ran a piece announcing this critical news a few months ago, telling us that in the People's Paradise, "marijuana is reportedly not considered a drug". It grows wild, is sold openly and the smell is everywhere. It's most popular among the lower classes because – get this, man – it's actually cheaper and nicer than the official state cigarettes. And it's rolled with the official organs of the state:
The Rodong Sinmun newspaper is a favorite rolling paper among many North Korean smokers. It is cut up into squares, then rolled into small, cone-shaped spliffs. A source confirmed to NK NEWS that they had found a half-lit joint on the ground in a rural area of the country with the Rodong Sinmun used as rolling paper.
Darmon Richter's blog offers a nice first person tale of visiting a black market and encountering stalls with piles of the drug going for as little as fifty pence.
As it turns out the "special plant," as they refer to it here, is completely legal. We decided to test the theory, purchasing papers from another stall before rolling up and lighting comically oversized joints right there in the middle of the crowded market. Bizarre as the situation was, it seemed a reasonably safe move – and with several hundred people already staring at us, we weren't going to feel any more paranoid than we already were.
If this news travels far, North Korea is likely to become a favoured gap year destination.
Does the wide availability of top quality sh*t better help us understand Kim Jong-un's regime? Let's look at the facts. In the last few months they have:
- Sunk the national budget into producing a new girl band
- Declared war on America (that must've been a fun afternoon)
- Opened a suspiciously large number of theme parks
- Decided to direct the country's resources into building a really, really big ski jump. And when Switzerland refused to sell them critical parts, accused the neutral chocolatiers of betraying North Korea's human rights (as in "it's my human rights to listen to Coldplay very loudly at 3 in the morning if I want to – MUM!")
It's also worth noting that Kim Jong-un's old girlfriend sang a song called Excellent Horse-Like Lady (see above), which could easily be something penned by Donovan while tripping the light fantastic in 1968. On the other hand, Kim did later have her shot – which suggests that the link between weed, peace and love is tenuous at best.

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