China tackles rising drug use

FANGSHAN, China (AP) The 40yearold restaurateur and his wife were at home
indulging their sixmonthold heroin habit when police burst in.

Packed off to a detention center, the couple became the latest drug addicts
arrested in China's renewed crusade to stamp out soaring narcotics use and
trafficking.

``I still don't know how they found out,'' said the man, dressed in white
and bluestriped pajamas, the inmates' uniform at Beijing's sole compulsory
drug treatment center. Then a wistful smile slipped under his yellowed eyes:
``I've left all that behind now.''

Faced with rising addiction and the threat to its own power, the Communist
government this spring ordered a threeyear nationwide crackdown, kicked off
by an AprilSeptember push relying on harsher penalties, public trials and
forced drug treatment.

As part of its effort, Beijing's police department took a group of foreign
reporters Wednesday for a rare look at the treatment center it runs in the
rolling hills 35 miles southwest of the city center.

Reporters were shown the spartan barracks that housed the addicts: neatly
made beds, plastic wash basins stowed underneath. Some addicts did
calisthenics in the center's leafy compound. Others sat in classrooms as a
police officer recited drug laws.

They also heard tales of lives broken by drugs from some of the center's 132
addicts heroin users except for a few and the official line for the
current campaign and forced treatment.

``I used to love singing and dancing. But after I started taking drugs, the
pleasure was gone,'' said a slight 21yearold who used to work in one of
Beijing's swankiest hotels. Like all the addicts, she spoke on condition that
her name not be used.

``When you take drugs, the whole day, whether your eyes are open or shut,
that's all you see.''

Such stories have become staples in the tightly controlled staterun news
media to scare the public during the current campaign. One newspaper ran a
nearly fullpage photo of a drug addict sticking a needle into his arm.

Others showed convicted drug offenders smoking a last cigarette before
execution.

To listen to the official propaganda, China is awash in drugs. Its population
of registered addicts jumped to 520,000 in 1996, nearly 7 1/2 times the
number five years earlier. The real number of addicts is higher.

Heroin is the biggest scourge, due to China's shared border with the opium
fields of the Golden Triangle of Burma, Laos and Thailand. Methamphetamines
and the designer drug Ecstasy, known in Chinese as ``headrocking pills,''
are becoming popular, especially with urban youth.

But by the standards of many Western countries, China's drug problems are
small. Officially, 47,236 pounds of heroin was seized nationwide in six
years. In Beijing, since 1992, police confiscated 128 pounds.

For the Communist Party, the seeming pervasiveness of drugs hits at its
legitimacy. Before its rise to power in 1949, the party harped on the shame
of widespread opium addiction, a legacy of a weak China battered into
accepting drugs by British warships.

Within the first half of the 1950s, the Communists executed dealers and
forced treatment on addicts, virtually wiping out the drug problem. Drugs
returned in the 1980s, left behind by the money and goods moving across
China's borders as part of economic reforms.

``The drug problem ... touches on social stability and national safety and
has become a great political problem,'' said Ruan Zengli, vice director of
Beijing's antinarcotics committee, which is overseeing the crackdown.

At the treatment center in Fangshan, addicts are given a strict threemonth
regimen of lectures and physical exercise. They must pay $725 of the $1,250
it costs for their stay, a course that includes a week or 10 days of
methadone treatment, if needed.

The restaurateur didn't. After his arrest, police held him in a detention
center for 10 days and gave him nothing. ``By the time I came here, the worst
was over.''

The former hotel worker was one of the few addicts who came ``voluntarily.''
Her father turned her in to police after he discovered her addiction, a
$600amonth habit that was taking half her income.

She praises the treatment center for helping prepare her for leading a
drugfree life. But she knows she has 40 days to go.

``I thought I could control myself. I used heroin for about a month and then
I was hooked,'' she said. ``If you give drug addicts full freedom, they won't
get cured.''