Kumdang-2 is a real North Korean pharmaceutical product — an injectable compound developed in the 1990s under state direction and officially claimed to cure HIV, cancer, and drug addiction simultaneously. The regime's decision to commemorate it on circulating-weight brass coinage in 2007 sits somewhere between propaganda exercise and hard-currency souvenir, almost certainly produced for export sale rather than domestic pocket change. North Korea had by that point developed a minor industry in novelty numismatic issues targeting foreign collectors.
KM# 107 is one of several thematic pieces from this period with no plausible domestic circulation function.
Kumdang-2 is a real North Korean pharmaceutical product — an injectable compound developed in the 1990s under state direction and officially claimed to cure HIV, cancer, and drug addiction simultaneously. The regime's decision to commemorate it on circulating-weight brass coinage in 2007 sits somewhere between propaganda exercise and hard-currency souvenir, almost certainly produced for export sale rather than domestic pocket change. North Korea had by that point developed a minor industry in novelty numismatic issues targeting foreign collectors.
KM# 107 is one of several thematic pieces from this period with no plausible domestic circulation function.