‘Devil’ of Opium Addiction Returns to Prey On China

A gaunt young man in a green sweat shirt put a pinch of brown powder on a piece of foil from a cigarette package, held a burning match below it and, as a thin wisp of smoke rose, drew it into his lungs.

“I’ve tried to give up, seven or eight times,” he said to a foreigner who had been allowed to enter this modern-day opium den only after overcoming suspicions that he was an American narcotics agent. “I can’t help myself. It’s my environment. All my friends smoke.”

Opium addiction, once widespread in China, was virtually wiped out after the 1949 Communist revolution. But relaxed social controls and opportunities to make money have now opened the door to a new wave of opium use, along with that of the opium derivative heroin.

“This devil, stamped out years ago, has reappeared in our country like a ghost,” the Beijing Youth News said in an article describing the sufferings of drug addicts in Xian. “It has not yet generally spread, but it will bring disaster if we don’t stop it.”

Drug use, in addition to its direct effect on users, is contributing to growing urban crime and the spread of the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS.

Here in the ancient city of Xian, gateway to China’s far western provinces, people blame addicts for a recent wave of taxi-driver killings and other violent crimes.

In southwestern Yunnan province, near the border with opium-producing areas of Myanmar (formerly Burma), authorities have identified 237 heroin addicts infected with the virus that causes AIDS. In all the rest of China, health authorities have discovered only 68 other people infected with the virus.

“Two years ago nobody dared do drugs so openly, but nowadays there is nothing people don’t dare to do,” a restaurant owner in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, told a recent visitor from Beijing. “The typical addict used to be a successful private businessman and now doesn’t have a penny.”

China’s drug problem also has international implications. A smugglers’ land route has been worked out across South China, linking northern Myanmar with the British colony of Hong Kong. From there, Myanmar heroin flows out to the United States and other parts of the world.

Drug usage in China, while expanding rapidly, is still low by American standards. Ordinary users caught by the police face up to a few months of imprisonment or enforced rehabilitation. For traffickers, though, penalties are severe.

In 1989, there were 547 cases of narcotics trafficking nationwide; 749 traffickers were arrested, and 592 pounds of opium and 634 pounds of heroin were seized, according to official statistics. In Yunnan alone, courts sentenced 136 traffickers to death last year and 68 others to life imprisonment.

This spring, authorities cracked China’s biggest drug case in 40 years, seizing 487 pounds of heroin and arresting 51 traffickers, including 41 Chinese citizens and 10 dealers from Myanmar, Hong Kong and Macao. Also confiscated was 1.6 million yuan (about $340,000) in “drug money” and “a large number of guns and vehicles,” the official New China News Agency reported.

State-run television last month showed footage of an anti-drug rally at a stadium in Yunnan, at which confiscated heroin and opium was destroyed by burning and death sentences against 14 drug traffickers were announced. The 14 traffickers were executed immediately after the rally, according to the New China News Agency.

A recent visitor to Xian saw four open-backed trucks parading a dozen shaven-headed criminals through town, accompanied by a motorcycle escort. The evening television news identified them as drug dealers but did not specify their fate.

In addition to stepped-up enforcement, the authorities are trying to fight back with educational campaigns and by establishing rehabilitation centers where addicts can go to withdraw from drugs.

In Gansu province, west of Xian, a traveler from Beijing recently saw several anti-drug roadside billboards. One had drawings that depicted a strong hand grasping and crushing three emaciated drug dealers, then showed a shovel burying three skulls. “Wage a People’s War to Annihilate Drugs,” the sign exhorted.

At a theater in Xian recently there was a performance of “Drug-Taking Penitence,” the story of a Qing Dynasty official who ruined his life and family with his addiction to opium.

“It’s to educate today’s young people not to use drugs,” said an employee at the theater entrance.

He said opium comes to Xian from nearby Gansu and from faraway Yunnan. He then gave his views on China’s social ills, noting that the late Chairman Mao Tse-tung never allowed such things.

“Nobody smoked drugs during Mao’s era,” he said. “Everyone had a job, food to eat, and earned about the same amount. Now there are rich people and poor people, and many youths don’t have work. So sometimes they steal things or use drugs. The past few years, social order hasn’t been so good, and drugs are a big reason. People steal and even kill for money to buy drugs.”

A driver for a hotel in Xian echoed this view.

“Several taxi drivers have been killed in the past year,” he said, and added that he refuses to take a job that would require him to pick up people on the street.

“It didn’t used to be like this,” he went on. “It’s because young people don’t have work, but they have to eat and have to buy clothes. And it’s because they’ve started to smoke opium.

“No one wants to smoke it at first, but someone says, ‘Oh, try it,’ and then they get addicted and have to buy it. They smoke 10 packets a day, and each packet costs 20 yuan (about $4). That’s 200 yuan a day. No one makes that much money. They have to steal.”

The official Chinese news media, in warning of the dangers of drugs, sometimes publicize lurid accounts of the sufferings of addicts and their families.

In Xian, the driver said, the authorities recently publicized the case of an entrepreneur who became addicted to opium.

“He pushed his wife into addiction, and she eventually became a prostitute to support the habit,” he said. “Then they turned their 4-year-old daughter over to another family to raise. The paper they signed didn’t call it selling the child, but that’s what it really was. He got several thousand yuan and used that for opium.”

The Beijing Youth News said that a drug addict in Xian named Zhang Qiang feigned an accident in an attempt to extort money from the driver of a tractor who passed by his home. This is a trick known to young hoodlums all across China and feared by many drivers.

When his addiction “began to show its effect again,” the newspaper said, Zhang “twisted, twitched and tossed until he lost all his strength. Then his whole body became cold. It was a hot day, but he wrapped himself in a quilt. Still he kept shivering. He couldn’t bear it anymore; he needed to get opium now!”

According to the periodical, Zhang seized a kitchen knife and ran outside, where a tractor hauling a load of sand and stone was passing his gate. “He deliberately fell down and rolled in front of the tractor,” the account continued. “The driver slammed on the brakes but nearly ran over his body. . . . Zhang jumped up and rushed to the driver, who had already stepped down. Grabbing the driver’s collar, he demanded 100 yuan (about $20) for medical treatment.”

When the driver refused and tried to drive away, the addict slashed him with the knife, robbed him and tried to flee, the paper said. Onlookers seized Zhang and beat him unconscious, and the police sent him to a hospital drug rehabilitation ward, where the Beijing Youth News reporter learned of the incident.

Until the past few years, drug-related crime was virtually unknown in most of China. But in Yunnan province, the Communists never succeeded in totally suppressing opium use.

“Drugs have always been available in Yunnan,” a Kunming watch repairman told a foreign student. “My neighbor never stopped even during the Cultural Revolution, because opium was still widely available. It was so cheap to buy it then. Nobody spent much.”

Heroin is now available in the Kunming black market for about $20 a gram, 10 times what it costs at the Myanmar border but only about half the price in Canton, the South China city near Hong Kong.

“It’s great for the big businessmen who deal it,” the Kunming restaurant owner said. “They don’t smoke it themselves.”

As in other countries, drug dealing in China has shadowy links with other forms of organized crime.

According to the foreigner who visited the Xian opium den, the addicts there “kept alluding to this black society,” and one commented: “You have any trouble in Xian, just come to us, we’ll help you. We have friends.”

In Gansu province, just west of Xian, railroad security officers arrested 85 alleged drug addicts and dealers at railroad stations in May and June as part of a province-wide crackdown, according to the newspaper Legal Daily. The authorities also closed six places used for producing, selling or taking drugs, the paper said.

Such raids seem to be a sign of tougher action to come.

“We should crack down hard,” a commentator said in the Gansu Daily in early May. “We should arrest and convict drug criminals, put some of them through reform by labor, and firmly impose the death penalty on those who are guilty of the most heinous crimes, so as to arouse the people’s spirit and deter criminals. We should focus on cracking down on drug syndicates and, at the same time, set deadlines for drug users to kick their habits or impose mandatory habit-kicking.”

The Beijing Youth News, in its article on Xian addicts, pleaded for society at large to “understand, pay attention to and solve” the opium problem. “We must kill it again before it spreads,” the paper declared.

But the authorities no longer exercise the kind of control over Chinese society they had in the first decades of Communist rule. Greater privacy and freedom of movement have created a new situation in which the total elimination of drug use seems impossible.

This is most obvious in the border areas of Yunnan.

“There are plenty of banned substances flowing through here,” a resident of Dali, a town west of Kunming, told a traveler from Beijing. “The government cannot check effectively enough to stop the trade.”

Times researcher Nick Driver contributed to this story.