CHINA'S WAR ON DRUG TRAFFIC GOES PUBLIC

Agents, International Collaboration Get Results

Kunming, China --- In class, the students pass around hollow pineapples
used to smuggle drugs, and practice their frisking techniques on a
blond-wigged mannequin.

This is China's next generation of anti-drug agents, training at a campus
in Yunnan province in the mountainous southwest. It can seem at times
almost lighthearted, but they face a daunting task. China is awash in
heroin and methamphetamine, much of it coming over the country's southern
border.

Reeling from the influx, China has gone from hiding the problem to making
it highly public. Last year, drug enforcers adopted new high-tech
communications, surveillance and detection techniques. Perhaps most
important, they have stepped up cooperation with China's Southeast Asian
neighbors.

Drug officials claim impressive results. Helped by cooperation with
Myanmar, heroin seizures in southwestern China soared 163 percent in 2001
to a record 17,855 pounds, according to Sun Dahong, a senior anti-drug
official.

Collaboration has ''strongly frightened the drug traffickers at home and
abroad and effectively checked the trafficking activities,'' Sun said.

During the 1980s and '90s, drug addiction was treated as a national
embarrassment, to be kept out of sight, hindering drug education efforts
and cooperation with other countries. Recently, though, police have issued
frank assessments of the challenge. Bai Jingfu, deputy director of the
National Narcotics Control Commission, warned on June 20 that despite
successes, the situation was grim.

Official statistics report that numbers of known addicts rose to 860,000 by
2000, from just 70,000 at the start of the decade. Experts say the actual
number of regular users probably tops 4 million; most are under age 35.

While signs of drug use are rarely seen in public, heroin's effects are
showing up in China's galloping rate of AIDS infection, now estimated at
850,000 victims. Most got the disease from sharing needles or poor
sanitation in the blood selling business.

Smugglers and dealers are routinely shot after brief trials. Addicts are
packed off to labor camps or stark compulsory detoxification centers, but
officials say less than 10 percent stay clean after release.

Between 1990 and 2001, 125,400 pounds of drugs were seized in Yunnan, said
Sun, head of the southwestern province's drug enforcement bureau. Almost
2,000 tons of chemicals used in the production of heroin and other drugs
were seized, and more than 100,000 suspects arrested, he said. During that
time, 32 Chinese law enforcement officers have been killed by drug
traffickers and 208 injured, Sun said. Public Security Minister Jia
Chunwang made a series of visits last year to sign China's first
cooperative anti-drug ventures with Thailand, Myanmar and Laos --- the
heroin-producing ''Golden Triangle'' of Southeast Asia --- and Vietnam.