Actor Gao Hu latest Chinese celebrity to face drugs charges

An actor has become the latest Chinese celebrity to face drug charges in a wave of detentions that an official said on Wednesday is one of China’s sternest crackdowns on illegal drug use in two decades.

Gao Hu, 40, who had a small part as a soldier in Zhang Yimou’s 2011 movie The Flowers of War, was detained by police for possession and use of marijuana and methamphetamine, the official Xinhua news agency said. Beijing police also announced the Tuesday detention in a brief statement.

Several celebrities have been detained on drug charges following a declaration in June by President Xi Jinping that illegal drugs should be wiped out and that offenders would be severely punished.

Illegal drug use has ballooned in China in recent decades, after being virtually eradicated following the 1949 communist revolution. Narcotics began to reappear with the loosening of social controls in the late 1980s. In more recent years, rising wealth and greater personal freedoms have been accompanied by a growing popularity of methamphetamines and the party drugs Ecstasy and ketamine. They are often bought on social media forums and consumed in nightclubs, leading to periodic police crackdowns.

The number of officially registered addicts in China was 1.8 million at the end of 2011. 

In June, Beijing police said they detained screenwriter and novelist Chen Wanning, whose pen name is Ning Caishen, for possession of drugs in an apartment in Beijing. He tested positive for methamphetamine, a stimulant, they said.

That same month, film director Zhang Yuan, who made the 2006 film Little Red Flowers set in post-revolutionary China, was detained for drug offences at a Beijing railway station after he tried to evade a random drug check, according to a report on the Beijing police’s microblog.