IN 1839, a high-ranking Chinese official named Lin Zexu wrote to Britain's Queen Victoria, appealing for help in stopping the flow of opium into China from India, then a British colony. The queen may never have received the letter, and the two countries eventually went to war over the drug trade, which China felt was not only depleting its monetary reserves but also destroying its social fabric.
More than 150 years later, China is facing another drug crisis, this time mostly from heroin flowing into the country through its western and southwestern borders. To cope, the country finds itself not appealing to a foreign sovereign, but co-operating with international aid agencies and law enforcement groups.
China has only recently begun openly admitting that it has a drug problem, publicising not only its school dedicated to anti-drug policing at Yunnan's Public Security College, but also the 130,000 arrests of users and dealers in the province from 1982 to 2001.
Current estimates of regular heroin users across the country vary from 860,000 to four million; the lower estimate is the official government figure, while the higher numbers come from aid agencies. The economic impact is yet to be studied fully, but experts say such drug traffic is almost always associated with organised domestic and international crime syndicates that also deal in human and weapons smuggling, and who can have a corrupting influence on local governments.
The social costs in Yunnan include a rising number of Aids cases, with infections found in all the province's 88 counties, a large number of them linked to needle-sharing by heroin users.
Researcher Deng Zhenglai, writing in this year's edition of Unesco's Globalisation, Drugs and Criminalisation study, said that in Guangdong province, use is high among the unemployed, underemployed and sex workers. Young people make up a disproportionate percentage of users in Guangdong. Guangzhou city, from where drugs are trafficked to Hong Kong and overseas, is particularly affected, and those under 25 make up about half the city's addicts, according to the study.