China Stepping Up War Against Drugs

In class, the students pass around hollow pineapples used to smuggle drugs, and they practice their frisking techniques on a blond-wigged mannequin.

This is China’s next generation of anti-drug agents, training at a campus in Yunnan province in the mountainous southwest. It can seem at times almost lighthearted, but they face a daunting task. China is awash in heroin and methamphetamine, much of it coming over the country’s southern border.

Reeling from the influx, China has gone from hiding the problem to making it highly public. Last year, drug enforcers adopted new high-tech communications, surveillance and detection techniques. Perhaps most important, they have stepped up cooperation with China’s Southeast Asian neighbors.

Drug officials claim impressive results.

Helped by cooperation with Myanmar, heroin seizures in southwestern China soared 163% in 2001, to a record 17,855 pounds, according to Sun Dahong, a senior anti-drug official.

Collaboration has “strongly frightened the drug traffickers at home and abroad, and effectively checked the trafficking activities,” Sun said.

During the 1980s and ‘90s, drug addiction was treated as a national embarrassment to be kept out of sight, hindering drug education efforts and cooperation with other countries.

Recently, however, police have issued frank assessments of the challenge. Bai Jingfu, deputy director of the National Narcotics Control Commission, warned June 20 that despite successes, the situation was grim.

After seizing power in the 1949 revolution, China’s communists tackled the drug trade by shooting opium dealers and forcing addicts to quit cold turkey. But heroin made a roaring comeback in the 1980s with the opening of China’s economy and loosening of social controls.

Official statistics report that the number of known addicts rose to 860,000 by 2000, from 70,000 at the start of the decade. Experts say the actual number of regular users probably tops 4 million; most are under 35.

Although signs of drug use are rarely seen in public, heroin’s effects are showing up in China’s galloping rate of AIDS infection, now estimated at 850,000 people. Most got the disease from sharing needles or poor sanitation in the blood-selling business.

Smugglers and dealers are routinely shot after brief trials. Addicts are packed off to labor camps or stark compulsory detoxification centers, but officials say fewer than 10% stay clean after release.

From 1990 to 2001, 125,400 pounds of drugs were seized in Yunnan, said Sun, head of the southwestern province’s drug enforcement bureau. Almost 2,000 tons of chemicals used in the production of heroin and other drugs were seized, and more than 100,000 suspects arrested, he said.

During that time, 32 Chinese law enforcement officers were killed by drug traffickers and 208 were injured, Sun said.

To help stem the flow, Public Security Minister Jia Chunwang made a series of visits last year to sign China’s first cooperative anti-drug ventures with Thailand, Myanmar and Laos -- the heroin-producing “Golden Triangle” of Southeast Asia -- and Vietnam.

Chinese police said information-sharing led to their biggest heroin bust to date -- 1,500 pounds seized in November in a joint raid with Myanmar police in Yunnan.

They said cooperation has also led to deportations or killings by police of key drug suspects, destruction of jungle drug labs in Myanmar’s northern Shan state, and crop substitution programs in opium-cultivating areas of Myanmar and Laos.

The Yunnan Public Security College’s anti-drug school in Kunming trains police from Myanmar. Sun said he envisions China becoming the regional enforcement leader. Police invited foreign reporters to tour the school, where they saw cadets in fatigues drilling with plastic model guns while others practiced high kicks against pad-wearing partners in a gym.

Photo displays showed addicts dead of overdoses or ridden with sores and swollen limbs.

In a drug-identification class, grinning cadets frisked a male mannequin in a safari suit and found phony drugs stashed in a bag strapped to the small of its back. The mannequin was dressed in a blond wig and a safari suit -- China’s way of showing that it views the drug problem as a Western import.

Another room had displays about drug trafficking blamed on foreigners, dating back to the early 19th century.

One sign lauded Lin Zexu, who launched one of the world’s first drug enforcement efforts in 1839 by ordering the destruction of opium brought by British merchants into the southern port of Guangzhou.

The incident led to war with Britain, which seized Hong Kong as a colony.

“Drugs: A century of national humiliation,” said the sign.