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Taskforce to combat border drugs trade

Soldiers and local militias will be used to combat increasingly rampant border drug trafficking activities, the Government announced yesterday.

The Public Security Ministry said a taskforce comprising police, militiamen, Customs officers, soldiers and residents would be set up in the southwest border area, near the Golden Triangle.

'This defence force is among measures to be introduced to tighten drug controls on our increasingly porous borders with Burma, Thailand and Laos,' Xinhua quoted a ministry official as saying.

The announcement, on International Narcotics Control Day, marked the authorities' intensified efforts to fight drugs.

'The force will help maintain public order in border areas and tighten exit and entry controls,' a drug officer said. 'Urgent steps must be taken to block the channels for drug trafficking through China as growing, processing and trafficking along the southwest border has become increasingly serious.' Ministry officials have pledged to strengthen co-operation with international organisations and other countries to combat cross-border trafficking.

The United States and China are to open drug enforcement offices in each other's capitals to exchange information and co-ordinate co-operation.

For six years Beijing has given agricultural aid worth 300 million yuan (HK$279 million) to peasants in the Golden Triangle to help them to switch from opium growing to sugar or grain farming.

Last year, a record 5.47 tonnes of heroin were seized by Chinese officials, who made 244,000 drug-related arrests and cracked 180,000 drug-related crimes. There were 540,000 drug addicts, 80 per cent of them under 35, registered throughout the mainland though officials say the real number could be much higher.

This week, authorities have executed 22 people convicted of drug trafficking following public rallies in cities including Shantou in Guangdong and Wenzhou in Zhejiang province.

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