Talk:Korea

Talk

Discussion for: Korea • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

Korea is the page for the Korean Peninsula as a whole. It covers hemp on the peninsula from the earliest finds to the present, hemp cloth and its heritage designations, the seed as food and medicine, the law of both states, and Korean seed in herbaria and genebanks. It carries no country infobox because it describes a peninsula shared by two states; the states have their own pages, South Korea and North Korea. Accessions whose seed is labelled only as Korean, with no place or state named, take this page as their country.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Sources and how they were read

Statutes of the Republic of Korea were read in Korean in the National Law Information Center (law.go.kr), version by version: the Narcotics Act of 1957 (Law No. 440) and its 1967 amendment; the Habit-Forming Drugs Control Act of 1970 (No. 2230) and its 1973 amendment (No. 2613); the Cannabis Control Act of 1976 (No. 2895) with its amendments of 1979 and 1989; the Act on the Control of Narcotics of 2000 (No. 6146); the amendment of 2018 (No. 15939) and its decree of 2019 (No. 29620); and the Act in force on 12 October 2026 (No. 21857). The reasons for enactment printed with each version were read with the texts.
North Korean law: no statute text was reached. The Law on Prevention of Drug Crimes of 2021 and the Criminal Code revision of 2022 are known from Kim (2024), whose abstract was read. Radio Free Asia's reading of a 2011 Pyongyang booklet of a Narcotics Control Law, said to date from 2003 with a revision in 2005, was not used because no official source for those dates was found.
Treaty status was read on the United Nations Treaty Collection pages for the Single Convention, the 1972 Protocol and the Convention as amended.
Heritage designations were read in the Korea Heritage Service's own records (its open data service and the National Heritage Portal) for Andong-po weaving, Sambe weaving and Gokseong Dolsil-nai.
Classical texts were read in the National Institute of Korean History's database: the Samguk sagi (Silla annals 1, King Yuri, year 9) in the collated text of the 1512 and 1573 printings, and Xu Jing's Xuanhe fengshi Gaoli tujing (1123), vol. 23. The Gaebyeok survey of 1923 was read in the same database.
Encyclopedia entries: the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture (Academy of Korean Studies) entries on sambe, sam, bast-fibre weaving, gilssam, mourning dress, shrouds and the Sinchang-dong site; the Andong regional encyclopedia entry on Andong-po.
Journal articles: Nelson and colleagues (2020) and Choi (2014) in full; Dal Martello and colleagues (2024), Doh and colleagues (2019), Sng and colleagues (2024), Woods and colleagues (2023) and Trubanová and colleagues (2026) in full text; Jo (2020), Ree (1966), Clarke (2006), Kang and colleagues (2025) and Kim (2024) from their abstracts, with Kang's supplementary table S1 for the Cannabis sativa row. Every citation was checked against its Crossref record.
Databases: GRIN-Global accession pages (PI 41728, PI 87141, G 33596, G 33599, G 33860); Genesys passport pages for IPK CAN 20 and CAN 23; GBIF occurrence records for the Paris sheet of 1891 and the St Petersburg sheet of 1908; the Harvard specimen index for barcode 00449591; the Korean Traditional Knowledge Portal entry for ma-in; FAOSTAT's crop production data (item 777, "true hemp", bulk file of 31 December 2025).
Reports and news: the Supreme Prosecutors' Office 2025 Drug Crime White Paper (pp. 42 and 53); the Ministry of SMEs and Startups press releases of 6 July 2020 and 30 April 2021; Rhee's 2020 UCLA dissertation (pp. 141–162) on the 1975 campaign; the Associated Press report of January 2017 by Eric Talmadge, read in The Jakarta Post's copy of the wire; Radio Free Asia's Korean report of 6 December 2016.

Where the sources differ

The Gungsan thread. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture dates the thread on a bone needle from the Gungsan shell mound to about 4500 BC in its entry on sambe and to 4000–3000 BC in its entry on gilssam; its entry on bast-fibre weaving puts fibre on spindle whorls from the site at about 3000 BC. None of these gives a laboratory identification of the fibre, and the excavation report of 1957 was not reached. Nelson and colleagues (2020) state that no hemp remains in Korea predate the Early Iron Age. The article gives both positions.
Hemp as medicine. Clarke (2006) wrote that South Korea had no local tradition of hemp as medicine or inebriant, while the Korean Traditional Knowledge Portal lists 52 prescriptions containing the seed. The two may use "medicine" in different senses (seed pharmacy, against use of the flowering plant); the article states both.
The 1975–1976 campaign. Counts differ: Rhee (2020) gives about 1,700 people caught up in it during 1976, citing Lee Yŏng-mi (2015); the Supreme Prosecutors' Office gives 1,460 arrested. A Korea Times column of 2022 gives more than 80 entertainers arrested within a month. The counting bases differ and are not reconciled.
The Cheongsam THC figure. Doh and colleagues (2019) give 0.34 per cent, citing the breeders' paper of 2002, which was not read. Koo and colleagues (2023) measured 0.02 per cent THC in female flowers by another method; the figures are not comparable and only the first is used.
The 1937 Pyongyang sheet. The Harvard specimen index gives the sheet's country as South Korea, while the locality is Pyongyang. In 1937 the peninsula was one country under Japanese rule; the article gives the locality and date only. The collector is not given in the index.
GBIF country labels. Two sheets of 1934 and 1938 in the Korea National Arboretum, from "Gaeseongsi" (Kaesong, now north of the border), are filed under the Republic of Korea, as is a 1935 sheet from "Ranan" whose place has not been identified. They are not used.
The North Gyeongsang hemp zone. The designation decision is dated 6 July 2020; the start and end of the demonstration period differ between sources (December 2020 to November 2022 in the ministry's 2021 release; a provisional permit to November 2027 reported in 2024). The article gives the designation only.
FAOSTAT and North Korea. Every North Korean figure for hemp in FAOSTAT is flagged as an estimate or imputed value; the article calls them estimates.

Sources not used, and why

Reports that cannabis is legal or freely smoked in North Korea (NK News in 2013, as quoted by other outlets; travel and advocacy sites) rest on unnamed visitors and were not used. The Associated Press report of 2017 quotes the penal code against them.
Radio Free Asia's report of May 2017 of a campaign to grow yeoksam through the women's union rests on anonymous sources, one of whom gave drone fuel as its purpose; it was not used.
The Peterson Institute blog post of December 2016 repeats Radio Free Asia's report of the same month and was not used as a second witness.
The Donguibogam text itself could not be reached (the classics database refused automated access); the article cites the Korean Traditional Knowledge Portal for prescriptions attributed to it.
Dal Martello and colleagues (2024) list "Shimoyakebe, Korea" in their text; Shimoyakebe is a Jomon site in Japan. Only their table row for Sinchang-dong is used.
The National Gwangju Museum's notice of 2012 on cloth from Sinchang-dong is no longer reachable at its address; the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture is cited instead.
Ren and colleagues (2021) name no Korean samples in their text; their sample table could not be read, so the paper is not cited.
The Seoul National University sheet of 1984 sequenced by Balant and colleagues (2025) appears only in the sequence archive's sample record and is not cited.

Open questions

Whether any of the three Korean seed lots grown at Mississippi in 1972 came from a place that a source can name. The labels say only "Korean".
The colonial Government-General's statistics on hemp area and cloth output, which would date the decline before 1945, were not found.
A dated census of licensed hemp growers in South Korea, by year.