China launches war on rampant drug crime

By Mure Dickie

BEIJING (Reuter) China has launched a campaign against rampant drug crime,
vowing to crack down on addicts, traffickers and local authorities who allow
growers to tend their illegal crops, officials said Tuesday.

A rising international tide of narcotics crime has helped create the most
serious drugs crisis in China since the trade was all but wiped out in the
early 1950s, the People's Daily said.

Beijing, which frequently executes drug traffickers, has ordered a nationwide
campaign that will run until September. It will aim to curb drug crimes
through tougher legal action, expanded propaganda and tighter organization,
said the newspaper, mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party.

``We must first make full use of all the weapons of the law to strike hard at
criminal drug activities and resolutely hold back their increasingly rampant
spread,'' it said.

Some local officials did not realize the seriousness of the drug crisis while
others even approved of drug production, the Xinhua news agency quoted the
National Committee of Narcotics Control as saying.

``It was discovered that some grassrootslevel authorities have privately
given the green light to drug growers, which has stimulated the spread of
drug production and use,'' it said.

The antidrug campaign will be combined with China's ``Strike Hard'' war on
crime, which had already targeted drug offenses, a narcotics commitee
official told Reuters.

China's Communists ended centuries of widespread drugs use in the years after
their 1949 revolution, but they have seen the trade in heroin, opium and
illegal stimulants surge back as economic reforms have loosened oncestrict
social controls.

More open borders have allowed drugs to flow across China from the ``Golden
Triangle'' opium growing region that straddles parts of Burma, Thailand and
Laos and on to markets in the West.

Increasing urban affluence has turned coastal cities into new centers of
demand, while thousands of surplus rural laborers have become hooked on drugs
either smuggled into the country or grown on the remote and temperate hills
of southwest China.

By the end of 1995, officials had registered 520,000 illegal drug users in
1,600 towns and counties, the People's Daily said.

10:41 042297