Young Addicts Spur China to Face Its Drug Problem

When China’s runaways and castoffs arrive in Guangzhou, the country’s southern boom town, they’re happy to see a friendly face at the train station.

Seemingly helpful gangsters pluck the young new arrivals out of the crowd, then give them food, clothing--and an addiction to heroin. Once hooked, the youths--all boys--must trade pickpocketed goods for their daily dose; the price is higher for a clean needle.

Police do occasional sweeps, locking up the youths for theft and drug use. But, denied access to their habitual heroin, the boys go through an agonizing withdrawal.

A recent police photo shows a batch of 12- and 13-year-olds covered in blood from clawing their faces and chests while going cold turkey.

Scenes like this have prompted Beijing to suddenly abandon its longtime claim to being a drug-free country and to launch a sweeping anti-drug campaign. A country proud of breaking mass opium addictions that were a legacy of 19th-Century British traders and of virtually eliminating drug use under Mao Tse-tung is fighting a new opium war.

In the past five years, China has become a major route for opium and heroin on its way from Southeast Asia’s notorious Golden Triangle to Europe and the United States.

As traffickers cross from poppy fields in Myanmar (formerly Burma) to the ports along China’s eastern seaboard, they are leaving a trail of addiction and AIDS contracted through contaminated needles that is worsening fast.

“Why start this campaign?” an official in Guangdong province’s Public Security Bureau, which is leading the crackdown, asks rhetorically. “Why take someone who is sick to the hospital? Something must be done before the illness spreads too far to cure.”

It is a plague that strikes both parvenus and peasants, those reckless with their newfound wealth from the country’s recent economic reforms and those desperately left behind.

When Mao came to power in 1949, China’s cities were littered with opium dens and the reclining bodies of the country’s 20 million addicts. Mao’s solution was simple but effective: Those who did not reform were shot.

Now the drugs are more potent and the means of taking them more direct. These days, users inject heroin, making it harder to quit than it was to quit opium, which was eaten or smoked instead of injected. Authorities are resorting to a modern mix of education and execution to stem the users’ growing numbers.

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By its own count, China has about 250,000 drug addicts, mostly younger than 30. The number has nearly doubled in the past two years. More than half live in southwestern Yunnan or Guangxi provinces, in small tribal villages.

But Guangdong province, because of its proximity to Hong Kong, its international ports and an increasingly prosperous population of 66 million, has become a major transit point, and thus the center of the crackdown.

The capital city, Guangzhou, is flooded with millions of transient workers, looking for easy money--one journey with drugs to the border nets nearly a year’s wage--or an easy escape from the economic stampede.

In the first two weeks of the campaign, police in Guangdong province say they arrested nearly 4,000 people, seized millions of dollars worth of opium and heroin, and confiscated weapons including antitank missiles and hand grenades. The weapons--remnants of Vietnam’s wars or pilfered from China’s army--make officials worry that the drug war is escalating beyond their control.

No one is exempt from the propaganda push: Red banners, reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, span Guangzhou’s streets, declaring, “Rescue drug abusers, punish drug pushers severely.”

Schoolchildren are paraded through exhibitions of gruesome photos showing gangrenous drug users and overdose victims. Factory workers must attend special seminars where they are taught that if they take heroin two times, they will become addicted.

The campaign is most keenly felt in Sanyuanli, a small Muslim area near Guangzhou’s railway station that is home to hundreds of Uighurs from Western China. Its narrow streets are lined with shops and restaurants, tended by bearded men and embroidered white caps. The village smells of roasting shish kebabs, burning incense and puffs of hashish.

It has become known as the place to get good Xinjiang food, or a kilo of heroin or hash.

Lately, it has also become a good place to get arrested: 202 people were seized in one day when the campaign kicked off, according to authorities.

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“People disappear every day now,” says Ali, a clothes trader from Xinjiang province. “Some of them are in prison. Some are dead.”

He says almost every traveler from Xinjiang carries some hashish to trade; a few traffic in more profitable heroin, which brings up to 1 million yuan (about $120,000) a kilo, or 2.2 pounds. Eyes heavy-lidded from a foray into his own stash, he nods toward two policemen setting up a roadblock at the village gate.

“We have to be very careful now,” he says.

If Ali were to be caught using drugs, he would be sentenced to three months of compulsory rehabilitation. A visit to a Public Security Bureau rehabilitation center--a two-hour bus ride from Guangzhou--shows that some of the institutions are little more than prisons. There are bars on the windows, and patients wear the same striped uniform as convicts.

Authorities say key elements of the program are Chinese medicines and psychological counseling, but former patients said in interviews that shocks from electric batons and unaided withdrawal are also part of the regime at some rehabilitation centers.

Patients must pay for their treatment unless they are indigent or underage. Down the road in the village of Zengcheng, a private clinic that is partly run by the province’s hygiene bureau is more expensive but a little more lenient. Perhaps too lenient.

“Patients can stay as long as they need to, and a friend can stay for free to help take care of them,” says a white-coated doctor at the clinic who asked that his name not be used. “Withdrawal is very, very difficult, so if you have a reliable friend, that person can bring you small amounts of heroin to make it easier.”

Part of this year’s campaign is a promise to build 100 new rehabilitation centers in Guangdong province, adding 15,000 beds. Nearly 1,000 drug users have turned themselves in for rehabilitation so far in the campaign, the Chinese government reported.

But that is only half the battle. A computer network set up to monitor addicts who completed treatment in the southwestern province of Yunnan found that 90% of them started using drugs again within a year of treatment.

The 10% who stopped for a year were opium users; heroin addicts find it nearly impossible to kick the habit.

“There’s a very high relapse rate,” Wong Qian Rong, a division chief with China’s Narcotics Control Commission, said in a telephone interview from Beijing. “It’s really a problem to find a successful method.”

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So authorities are trying to stop the problem before it starts, though it is difficult to catch smugglers.

Although police recently reported a record-breaking seizure of 284 pounds of heroin, most couriers move it in smaller bundles that are harder to detect.

In 1992, officials discovered heroin-filled condoms packed inside koi bound for a San Francisco aquarium.

The “Goldfish Case” is also notable for causing a rift in U.S.-Chinese cooperation after a Chinese witness asked a U.S. judge for political asylum during testimony. The case is still on appeal.

But unlike that witness, most traffickers do not get a second chance. Carrying 1 3/4 ounces of heroin or opium can mean a bullet to the back of the head.

“Prevention,” Wong says, “is always easier than the cure.”