ASIAN CRISIS FUELS NARCOTICS ABUSE

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) The economic crisis that swept across Asia in 1997
has fueled a sharp increase in the use of amphetamines, further enriching
drug lords who largely built their fortunes through heroin trafficking,
narcotics experts said today.

China has become the largest smuggling gateway for heroin trafficked to the
outside world from the so-called Golden Triangle, the rugged opium-growing
region where the borders of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand converge.

Citing a report by the U.N.-financed International Narcotics Control Board,
the experts said the economic boom that swept across East Asia in the
mid-1990s and the subsequent economic collapse in 1997 helped fuel drug
abuse.

Economic conditions weakened traditional Asian family structures and put
more stress on individuals, creating the conditions for greater drug abuse,
the experts said.

For example, during the boom, children were left alone more often as their
parents went out after big-money jobs. Lacking supervision, many children
succumbed to peer pressure and started to take drugs, the experts said. The
boom also created more wealth, which enabled people to buy drugs.

Amphetamines have become the most widely abused drug in Asia and are
increasingly produced by drug lords who are supported by ethnic minority
armies in Myanmar as an easier-to-make sideline to their opium and heroin
businesses.

Sorasit Sangpresert, deputy secretary-general of the Thai Office of the
Narcotics Control Board, said amphetamine addicts doubled from 250,000 in
1995 to 500,000 last year in Thailand.

Some experts put the figure at closer to 1 million of Thailand's 60 million
people, and say users range from unsupervised schoolchildren to laborers who
use the stimulant to work longer hours for overtime pay.

Along with amphetamines, drug lords are also peddling heroin into tribal
areas in the Triangle where opium is traditionally smoked and creating an
army of addicts using needles for the first time, increasing the cases of
AIDS.

Injecting heroin has also become rampant in Myanmar, also known as Burma,
and in southern China's Yunnan province, which has supplanted Thailand as
the preferred route for smugglers taking heroin out of the Triangle to reach
world markets.

"Today, 85 percent of all heroin seized in Southeast Asia is seized in
China," said Christian Kornevall, regional representative of the U.N. Drug
Control Program.