Alcohol is cheap as fuck in China. Some parts of the ex-USSR like Armenia are well known for their cognac.
Fun fact: the psychedelic αMT was first developed as an anti-depressant in the USSR, and available under the name Indopan in the 1960s.
It came as 5 mg or 10 mg tablets, but you just had to take two or three and you would be tripping balls. If you look at the chemical structure, it's like amphetamine except the base structure is a tryptamine instead of a phenethylamine.
In general, Soviet chemists invented some weird ass nootropics and stimulants, some are still available on the market in Russia.
Weed is not illegal in the DPRK. Probably not used as a drug, but it grows around and nobody cares.
The War on Drugs comes from two things:
- The US who started to ban hemp (i.e. cannabis) because hemp could be used as a cheaper alternative to cotton, and obviously, slave owners didn't want such competition.
- Asian countries who banned basically everything except alcohol, tea and tobacco, after the Chinese Century of Humiliation, that was in large part due to the Opium Wars. In Japan, meth was legal in the 1940s-1950s, and its use was encouraged for pilot fighters (hence the kamikazes) and then to rebuild the country after the war, but they ended up noticing it could induce severe psychosis when abused, so they banned it… but meth is still more popular than weed as an illegal drug in Japan.
It's not an historical fatality. As someone who is probably a Marxist, you should be somewhat aware of historical materialism: the laws and social attitudes change over time according to the discoveries of science, made by studying the material world, etc.
In the 19th century, opium and cocaine were legal and promoted as miracle drugs. Then it turned out they aren't so miraculous after all, "what goes up must go down", heroin which was marketed as a non-addictive alternative to morphine was in fact more addictive, etc.
Yet, every attempt to ban drugs result in the appearance of a black market, yes, even in China where punks used to chug cough syrup containing DXM (and in fact China is a leading manufacturer not only of fentanyl, but of every drug known to man that
isn't illegal yet, aka "grey market drugs").
It's dialectical you see.
Should we care about what "socialist states" in the 20th-century did regarding drugs? They weren't even successful, they collapsed or reverted to capitalism anyway.
I think the 21th-century is the time when a rational approach to drugs will be more accepted. The means of production can't stop creating new drugs with weird names like 5-MeO-N-DEAOP-NMT and IHCH-7113, and it's a fool errand to blanket ban them all, because it's a Sisyphean task, and some of them might have therapeutic properties.
Look at the glory of prohibition: people shooting tranq or krokodil and losing their limbs. Well done.