'This bill is rather urgent': ROK-US relations and the 1970 and 1975 marijuana crackdowns

My article "'This bill is rather urgent': ROK-US relations and the 1970 and 1975 marijuana crackdowns" from Transactions 98 summarizes a substantial portion of the research I did for my MA, about the criminalization of marijuana in South Korea in 1970 and its influence on the better-known marijuana crackdown of 1975. One of the more surprising findings was that – contrary to current attitudes – the ROK government showed little concern about rising marijuana use among American soldiers in the late 1960s and largely ignored USFK requests to enforce existing laws – an approach that continued until Nixon Doctrine troop withdrawals were publicly announced in June 1970.

The day after that announcement, Korean-language newspapers suddenly declared that marijuana use had become a serious social problem, with some reporting that university students were using it (though, oddly, days earlier only English-language papers like The Korea Times and Stars and Stripes had reported a story about high school students smoking it in Incheon). Equally revealing were National Assembly committee minutes from deliberations on the Habit-Forming Drug Control Bill passed the following month, in which the deputy minister of health acknowledged that marijuana was “not a big problem at this point in Korea” – which contradicted the alarmist tone of news reports at the time. 

The dormant Habit Forming Drugs Bill sleeps atop the National Assembly while users openly smoke marijuana. This cartoon, published in The Korea Times June 10, 1970, is the only political cartoon about the 1970 marijuana 'scare' that I've found.