After a year in which the volume of cocaine seized by police grew tenfold and the street price fell by 40 per cent, authorities now have something else to worry about - the emergence of crack cocaine.
Police and medical workers have reported a big increase in the number of people getting into trouble with crack, a far more potent and addictive form that retails for less than its powdered counterpart.
'In the last couple of years crack cocaine has come into popularity,' said Kwai Chung Substance Abuse Assessment Unit senior medical officer Ben Cheung. 'There has been a change in the period from 2003 to 2004; where before all my patients were taking the powdered version, now 79 per cent of them are here for problems with crack.'
And over the same period, the average age of users had dropped from 32.1 years to 19.6, said Dr Cheung, and 'availability of crack has probably been behind that'.
The rise of crack has raised serious concern, although the top official in the fight against illegal drugs, Narcotics Commissioner Rosanna Ure Lui Hang-sai, said it must be kept in perspective.
'Cocaine abuse is certainly something that has been on our radar for some time, but the incidence of people using [any form of] cocaine is still not very high in comparison with heroin,' Mrs Ure said. Of 10,124 drug users registered with the government last year, only 94 said they had used cocaine.
'Put in the overall context, heroin is still the most commonly abused drug in Hong Kong,' she said. 'But what we have found is that the number of heroin users is coming down and the number of people abusing psychotropic drugs, of which cocaine is one, is on the rise. So we have reallocated resources to address this.'