Meet the heroin trafficker’s son who is trying to save China’s ‘drug orphans’ one child at a time
- Peng Lisheng’s life was turned upside down when he learned that his father was in prison for his involvement in the drug trade
- He uses his first-hand experience to help families struggling with the scourge in his remote corner of the country
As a child, Peng Lisheng had only vague memories of his father. His dad was not home often and the few times that he was he would be startled by loud noises at the front gate and sneak out through the back door of their home in Tongxin, a small county in northwest China’s Ningxia Hui autonomous region.
Peng’s mother told him that his father was doing business in a far off city. It wasn’t until 2001 when he came home from school and found his mother crying that he learned what his father was really doing.
His mother had received a letter from his father in a prison in Yunnan province, about 2,000km (1,250 miles) away, saying he had been jailed for trafficking heroin.
His father had been working for a drug lord, carrying heroin from Yunnan to Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province. He had just boarded the train in Kunming, when police arrested him in possession of more than 200 grams (seven ounces) of the drug, earning him 23 years in prison for trafficking.
In that moment, Peng became a “drug orphan”, one of the many children in the area whose lives have been turned upside down by the endemic drug trade. The experience left deep scars on Peng – so much so that he has set up a non-profit group to help others confronting similar trauma.
Tongxin is home to a mostly Hui Muslim population and is part of an impoverished strip of land known as Xihaigu, an area the United Nations described in the 1970s as “the most unfit place for human settlement”.