A Psychedelic Summer.(drug use in Japan)(Brief Article)

The man behind the counter, who calls himself Carlos, offers a baggie full of dried Mexican sage. "Just like pot," he says, "only more hallucinations." In his head shop, located on the eighth floor of a nondescript building, kids too young to drive peruse blown-glass pipes and Moroccan hookahs. A display case holds eight metal saucers with different powders fashionable at raves and clubs the world over. One of them, called alpha-methyltryptamine, or AMT, "is just like mushrooms," Carlos offers. Another, blue mystic, reputedly mimics the effects of ecstasy and LSD.

Amsterdam? Maybe. But Tokyo? Long known for its no-nonsense drug enforcement, Japan is in the midst of a psychedelic summer. Most of the fantasy fuels remain legal because of loopholes in local drug laws. Even contraband is easily procured. Nearly every weekend barefoot ravers flock to the slopes of Mount Fuji to trip all night and view the peak at dawn. Could this be the country that jailed Paul McCartney in 1980 for stashing marijuana in his guitar case? Or recently threatened to bar Argentine football legend and convicted cocaine user Diego Maradona from entering the country to comment on the World Cup finals? None other, according to fliers for trance-music shows and new magazines that explain how best to cultivate and score various chemicals. One cover line captures the mood perfectly. It reads: drug happy brain!

The party was supposed to end on June 6, when Japan's Health Ministry banned "magic mushrooms." The fungus had been traded freely for more than a decade due to a loophole in the 1990 Narcotics Control Law that banned the sale of its active ingredient, psilocybin, but not commerce in the 'shrooms themselves. The oversight remained a secret guarded by aging hippies until the late 1990s, when head shops and street vendors sprouted up in Tokyo to peddle mushrooms for profit. Then came the overdoses, media attention and eventual revision of the law. But that has done little to stop the kids or the chemists. The Health Ministry's exasperation was apparent when it issued a statement in April saying, "The methods of abuse have become diverse and ingenious, and we ...