China's drug nightmare

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.

This latest phenomenon goes hand-in-hand with the opening up of China to greater economic and other ties. It is generally accepted that any serious drug problem that existed pre-1949 - one that included an addiction rate estimated as high as 25 per cent of the population in Yunnan province - was eradicated through tough measures that forced users to quit and by the destruction of the fields where poppies were grown.

Some observers trace the current usage of illicit drugs in China to the 1980s, when more open borders led to a freer flow of goods and people, as well as drugs from the Golden Triangle bordering southwestern Yunnan province.

Mr Deng said the roots could go back earlier, to the 1970s, when more stringent enforcement against drug trafficking in Thailand and Myanmar forced organised groups there to turn to China as an alternate route for exporting their opium and heroin to markets outside Asia. Routes through Yunnan, Guangdong and then inland cities, in turn created domestic demand for the drugs, with 70 per cent of China's counties and cities reporting drug activity by the 1990s, according to Mr Deng.

In the 1980s, dozens of heroin-producing labs were set up in the area of Myanmar that borders Yunnan, which, with its 4,060km international border, began its rise as a hub for trafficking and a base of consumption. Another trafficking front opened up in later years, bringing opium and heroin in from Pakistan and Afghanistan through Tibet, and the Gansu and Xinjiang regions, forming a drug production and trafficking area eventually dubbed the Golden Crescent.

Yunnan's capital, Kunming, offers convenient flights to the major cities in eastern and central China. According to Mr Deng, couriers take long-distance buses from Ruili to Kunming daily, and pass the drugs to others, who swallow them and board planes for other parts of China. The couriers have two major advantages: human and goods traffic along these routes are heavy enough to make detection difficult, and border or airline personnel may not be well-trained in detecting smugglers. Chinese officials have grown so alarmed by the situation that they have stepped up co-operation in UN-sponsored multilateral efforts and are training Myanmar police at the drug policing school in Yunnan.

Through co-operation with the UN Drug Control Programme, China has also taken custody of high-profile drug lords Tan Xiaolin and Shang Chaomei. Some reports have the government claiming success in the fight, but traffic does not seem to have abated, especially if the Yunnan statistics are anything to go by. The number of drug seizures in the province more than doubled, from 4,898 to 11,223 from 1995 to 2001, and the volume of heroin seized in the same period rose from 1,434kg to 8,046kg. The Yunnan seizures of amphetamine-type substances (ATS), a category of stimulants that includes popular 'club drugs' Ecstasy and Ice, have also risen, indicating the same networks involved in heroin and opium are also getting involved in these high-volume, high-profit drugs. ATS seizures in Yunnan reached 806.4kg in 2001, up more than 40 times from the 16.9kg in 1997. Yngve Danling, a law enforcement adviser with the UN in Thailand, said the rising numbers in the late 1990s reflect higher demand in China and increased reliance by traffickers on Yunnan-based routes to international markets. In the case of Yunnan and much of the rest of China, the improved infrastructure and the rise in goods and people traffic make it easier for the drug syndicates to operate efficiently and without detection.

China's main strategy for dealing with the opium trade in the 1800s was to arrest and execute smugglers. Today, this still happens, but there are signs longer-term solutions are being sought. Australia, France, Germany, the US and Thailand all have offices in Beijing whose main task is to liaise on drug enforcement efforts.

China has joined the UN Drug Control Programme-sponsored Border Liaison Office drug control efforts, which now take in Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. It also hosted a regional drugs conference in Beijing this summer. Another encouraging sign is the agreement to co-operate on a programme in Yunnan to study the Aids risk to drug users, which is being set up by China's Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, and a unit of the National Institutes of Health in the US.

Stepping up international co-operation to deal with drug syndicates is a positive sign, but in order to win this latest drug war, China will also have to address the social issues that give rise to demand and the public health problems related to drug use.

Anh-Thu Phan is Associate Editor of the Post's opinion pages

Graphic: DRUG18GET