FUKUOKA — “It gave me a fresh sensation, and I could not stop laughing just by making eye contact with another person,” the man recalls of the first time he smoked marijuana when he was 13, as he had just started junior high school. Now 20 years old, he still can’t let go of his cannabis use.
This Mainichi Shimbun reporter met the man in the summer of 2022. I had asked a nonprofit organization in the city of Fukuoka supporting young delinquents for cooperation to look into a surge of cannabis use among youths. The group introduced the man to me and I interviewed him.
Born in a city in the Kyushu region, he was raised by his mother who worked as a hostess at a bar. There was no father in the picture. The man said he was abused by his mother, and he would repeatedly run away from home. He would then be taken in by a child consultation center.
After starting junior high school, he would go out night after night with his friends. One night, he was approached by an adult man at a convenience store parking lot. “Let’s exchange a cigarette with this. Smell this,” the older man told him. What he sniffed out of curiosity that night was marijuana.
When he got out of a juvenile reformatory for the second time at age 16 after committing assault at a welfare home for…
