VIETNAMESE POLICE REPORT 9,000 DRUG CASES IN 1998

HANOI, Jan. 6 (Kyodo) -- Vietnamese police last year detected 9,000
drug-smuggling and trafficking cases, and arrested 18,600 people involved,
a newspaper reported Wednesday.

The figures in 1997 were 7,000 cases and 14,000 people arrested, the
English-language daily Vietnam News said, quoting Truong Huu Quoc, director
of the Drug Control Department of the Ministry of Public Security.

Quoc said the police last year confiscated 1,135 kilograms of opium, 56.57
kg of heroin, and 398 kg of cannabis, most of it smuggled into Vietnam.

Quoc was quoted as saying the country's courts at various levels last year
sentenced 49 people to death and 31 others to life imprisonment for
drug-related activities.

Vietnam's National Assembly last year amended the penal code to give the
death penalty to those found in possession of 100 grams or more of heroin,
in a move to cope with an explosion of drug use, especially among the young.

Also last year, the police detected cases of cultivation of opium poppies
and marijuana in various parts of the country, Quoc said.

As a result, 33,536 hectares of poppy fields and thousands of square meters
of marijuana plantations in the northern mountains and the Mekong Delta in
the south were uprooted, the paper reported Quoc as saying.

Quoc said Vietnam now has an estimated 80,000 drug addicts, 1,500 of them
junior high school students, and the number of heroin users continues to rise.