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He Huifeng

Mimi Lau

Guangdong's booming illicit drug trade and large population of addicts have made it a top target in a new nationwide police crackdown.
Guangdong and Shandong provinces each have 10 cities among the 108 covered by the crackdown from the Ministry of Public Security, the People's Daily online news portal reported yesterday, citing assistant minister Liu Yuejing.
The southern province is the mainland's biggest market for illicit drugs and has developed a clan-based industry for the manufacture of synthetic narcotics, especially Ice, or methamphetamine, some experts say.
It also has the biggest population of addicts, with about 457,000 people on a register of suspected users, according to the provincial public security department.
The total has been growing by about 40,000 people a year since 2009, the China News Service reported.

Li Xiaodong , executive member of the board of the China Association of Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment, said one of the big issues was migrants from other parts of the country.
"Guangdong has the biggest migrant population in China. More than 60 per cent of drug users in Guangdong were from other provinces, according to our study in 2012," Li said. "There are many cases of Hong Kong people making the trip to Guangdong to use drugs."
Peng Peng , a researcher at the Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences, said that unlike traditional drugs such as heroin and opium, most of which were imported, production of Ice had developed into a local industry.
Peng said several places in eastern Guangdong had become key manufacturing centres, churning out an estimated one-third of the country's local supplies in recent years. For example, three tonnes of Ice and 23 tonnes of raw materials were seized in a bust last year in Boshe, a village in Lufeng .
He said the industry was protected by local officials and drugs made in Guangdong were sold across the province and country.
"One or two campaigns will not be able to eliminate an industry in which so many local people make a living," Peng said.
The ministry said its six-month campaign, which started in September, would target drug production, trafficking and selling. By Tuesday, officers had arrested 23,959 suspects, confiscated 12.1 tonnes of drugs and investigated more than 100,000 users. The crackdown would be widened to cover online drug dealing and drug driving.
Inner Mongolia-based criminal lawyer Cao Chunfeng said that the national drug problem was serious.
"Port cities in Shandong are not major markets [for drug consumption], but they serve more as transport hubs for drugs supplying Mongolia, South Korea, Japan, as well as other Chinese cities," Cao said. "There's more risks and costs with transporting drugs over a long distance, creating huge commercial interest in manufacturing drugs locally."


Guangdong is the top target in China's nationwide drug crackdown

Police display the huge seizure of drugs at Boshe village, Guangdong. Photo: Reuters

News

China

Province is mainland's biggest market for illicit narcotics and has largest population of addicts


Guangdong's booming illicit drug trade and large population of addicts have made it a top target in a new nationwide police crackdown.
