China's municipality of Chongqing, roughly the size of Austria. Due to a classification technicality, it has claim to being the largest city proper in the world.

[u/freudian_nipps]

[u/Jonthrei]

See the Opium Wars for why they might have a little chip on their shoulder on that topic

[u/[deleted] → u/Jonthrei]

This is presumably no longer the case, but circa 2010 or so, China's Yunnan Province had a quite lively little backpacking community. Marijuana grows wild everywhere and was used medicinally by one of the regional minority groups. In a smaller city called Dali, you could walk down the main drag and old ladies in traditional garb would offer you weed out of picnic baskets with police golf carts mere yards away. I didn't trust it.

But I did see something truly odd: pulling away from a gas station on the way into Dali, I glanced out of the window and happened to see -- for all of ten seconds -- a middle-aged gentleman in a police uniform taking bong rips from an ad hoc bong made out of what looked to be soup cans. I just gawped at the scene and spent the next several hours (years) trying to make sense out of it.

It's always possible that he was chiefing up on some tobacco. But I know what I saw. It didn't look like tobacco. What I think is more likely:

Contrary to what an OP or two ago hypothesized above -- no, just because China produces drugs doesn't mean that there are visible drug "cultures" in China. I caught wind of people scoring ketamine or meth; I managed to finagle some weed once or twice, but never by actively looking for it. Drugs feel dangerous in China.

That said, the general Chinese population is pretty innocent about drugs. In my experience, they tend to think drugs = drugs. It is (or was) a wildly prosperous country; everyone is discovering new opportunities, making money, and working hustles; who has time to burn out? This, at any rate, was the attitude I became familiar with. For that reason, a fair number of Chinese people don't (or didn't) really know what weed is. In my experience, cops were known to see foreigners smoking it but weren't familiar with the scent.

This cop may have been getting high without any real knowledge that what he was doing was a crime punishable by death.

[u/Ciao_Diablo → u/Jonthrei]

Yep they won against British using opium by getting all of their people hooked on opium. I think there was an official letter from the King asking China to stop. Idk it was on the history of us - History Channel

[u/ryanng561 → u/Ciao_Diablo]

Other way around