drug scandal in my work neighborhood!

My friend Neil sent me an article about a drug scandal in the Daechi district, which is where I work. Daechi is famous for the high number of hagweons (private institutes for students, often called "cram schools") per square kilometer. The article talks specifically about the Daechi scandal before widening the discussion to how Korean society in general is, more and more, falling prey to drugs. This is tough to take for a culture that has historically had very strict drug laws, and that takes a dim view of most drugs aside from alcohol. 

The Daechi scandal involves some people—at least one late-40s man and a 20-something accomplice—who gave "energy drinks" to students, telling them that the drinks would improve their mental focus. The drinks actually contained a level of methamphetamine and, once the students had innocently drunk the concoction, the older men contacted the students' parents (how did they do this?) to say the kids had done drugs—all of this presumably as a step toward extortion. While the particular hagweon where this occurred wasn't named in the article, the institute was described as "the largest private academy" in Seoul. (I assume that that's not my academy even though we have many branches.)

Later on, the article discusses the ever-growing drug problem in South Korea, and how hard it's becoming to clamp down on the problem. As an aside, North Korea has rampant problems with both meth and fentanyl; I can imagine that cross-border traffic with China brings in a lot of the stuff. South Korea, at least, can be trusted to be more open and vocal about the drug issue than North Korea will ever be, but openness about a problem is never enough: look at how America has had an ongoing "conversation" about race, and my fellow Yanks are more racially divided than ever—or at least, that's what the media want us to believe.

I'll keep my fingers crossed as South Korea deals with its metastasizing drug problem. I told my boss last year that South Korea right now reminds me of 1980s-era America in many ways. I'd hate to see Korea lose that relative innocence and simplicity, and I'm not sure the culture has the mechanisms to deal with something like a blossoming meth crisis. Like it or not, though, the interconnected world is going to keep bringing problems to South Korea's doorstep. Some of those problems will be handled deftly by Korea's cultural immune system, but other problems will exploit the flaws in that system until Koreans figure out their own way of dealing with them. Good luck to us all.