Late night on Wednesday, November 25, a large contingent of Beijing police turned up at the gates of the Midi School of Music, one of the country’s hallowed rock institutions.
This was the full force of the law – eight vehicles, a special investigation team, dozens of officers – brought down on nearly 300 confused students, who were detained and forced to take a drug test.
The result of this “crackdown”? 16 kids arrested for mild marijuana use, all of them first-time offenders.
One of the more depressing trends in the Chinese music industry this year has been a deeper entrenchment of the view, in official circles, that “rock music” and “decadent western culture” are intrinsically linked. Look no further than Xi Jinping’s recently published comments on the “problems” of contemporary culture to understand how deep this perceived connection runs.
This means China has pursued an enforcement strategy predicated on an inherent suspicion of “rock music” and its associated cultural “lifestyles.” A view that they have to be carefully watched lest they open the floodgates to juvenile delinquency and drug addiction.
The kids at the Midi School of Music were, of course, were just being kids. There was nothing sinister, nothing “abusive” in their consumption (note: consumption, not intent to distribute) of pot. There is no evidence to suggest that it was anything other than recreational. But a subsequent statement on the incident reported that Midi School administrators “should bear full responsibility and sincerely apologize”, as if the fact that it was a school dedicated to rock music was proof enough that it was personally responsible for this behavior.
Globally, the tide has turned against punitive enforcement of Marijuana.
Pot is now all but legal in the US and most of the developed world. Last week, the state of Uttarakhand in India legalized cannabis cultivation, signaling a shift in thinking in China’s biggest neighbour.
China is only now coming into first official contact with teething drug problems, with a growing middle class and widening entertainment horizons for its youth.
If recent developments are any indication, it will be a while before the country will be willing to take a progressive position on marijuana use.
Part of the issue is the one-size-fits-all zero tolerance policy on drugs, and it’ll be hard to disentangle recreational marijuana consumption from the broader ambit of “Drugs = Bad”. Any loosening up will also be perceived as a “weakness”, as some kind of allowance to “foreign influences”, causing the state to lose face among political conservatives and the old guard.
A second set of issues is societal. The push for legalization is driven strongly by civil society, and tackling drug use is still a toxic area for many groups on the ground. NGOs would struggle to get their voice heard if they stood behind a thorny issue like legalizing recreational marijuana.
A third set is one of incentives. One of the issues that turned the tide in the US was money from taxing cannabis – but that’s an unlikely motivator for China. The police and security apparatus in China is also a powerful force, and it receives immense support for its drug enforcement policies.
But it’s precisely these policies that need to change. Until such a position is adopted, China can expect many of the same problems that prohibition caused in the US and Europe: billions spent in punitive, unnecessary incarceration and criminalization of the young and curious. The murky consequences of a lucrative, unregulated black market. The reluctance to have strong education and safety programs.
All of which are avoidable problems.