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Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Not sure we can blame the drugs themselves, or the human condition. Addictive drugs are available all over the world. And yet some societies have much worse problems with addiction than others. There’s clearly a cultural element at work.
Japan and S Korea are prosperous, first-world countries. They have social issues, but nothing like our levels of addiction and homelessness. Something in their societies make people less vulnerable to abandoning family, jobs, etc in pursuit of drugs to the point of self-destruction. I’d suggest it’s their conformist, more family-centered and authoritarian culture. There are simply more people in those cultures monitoring and intervening in the behaviour of family members than in far more individualistic North American society.
Vices are often the flip-side of virtues. In the individualistic West, people are free to chart their own course. Defy their family, traditions, institutions to do as they please. That autonomy is a good thing for most of us. But for those who are vulnerable to addiction and mental illness, it means they can pull away from all of their social support to indulge their most self-destructive impulses to an extent that their counterparts in other societies simply don’t have the freedom to.
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There is certainly a cultural element. However, I am hesitant to agree that S Korea and Japan do not have self harm issues. Their rate of suicide is greater than Canada.
South Korea has some of the highest rates of suicide in the world.
https://ourworldindata.org/suicide