CONTROLLING DRUGS: CHINA'S LESSON FOR THE WORLD

During the difficult years that preceded the British handover of Hong
Kong to China, the Chinese government's intense antipathy to opium and
the still fresh memories of the evil that eighteenth century
buccaneering Britain had inflicted on China and Hong Kong added an
extra emotional charge to what, anyway, was a most complicated
transition. Without opium there would have been no Hong Kong. The
British only acquired it because of the Opium Wars, and the city's
early economic success was built on the opium trade.

It was the British who fed the Chinese propensity for opium.
Historians point out that the Chinese would have found it elsewhere,
even grown some of it themselves. But the truth is the Indian-grown
opium was the brand the Chinese smokers savored and the British East
India Company marketed it with commercial elan.

Today the Chinese authorities regard opium as a singularly bad thing.
On this issue mainstream opinion is as black and white as a panda. But
in Hong Kong there is a public debate, shades of gray, layers of
complexity, both historically and currently. The study of opium
becomes as complicated as an addict's dreams and the solutions to
abuse as tortuous as cold turkey.

It was the Communist revolution that expunged opium in mainland China.
Mao Zedong with his political apparatus that reached into every hamlet
and home was able, as he repressed so many attributes of human nature,
both good and bad, to lay the beast low.

It was a mixture of carrot and stick. Addicts were not condemned but
offered medical help and rehabilitation. But those who were
uncooperative were sent to labor camps or imprisoned. Dealers were
summarily executed, often without trial.

China was clean for 40 years, until the demise of Maoism. Gradually
opium has returned. Now China is one of the world's most important
opium growers and its addict population exceeds 800,000.

Although China still regularly executes drug traffickers, demand in
its freewheeling economic society finds willing suppliers prepared to
take the risk. As a Chinese proverb puts it, "If you open a window,
sunlight comes in, but so do mosquitoes".

Government attitudes in China have not changed. But the market is a
match for government, as it is almost everywhere. The black market
grows by the decade and repression, unless it is totally totalitarian,
leaves enough loopholes for the determined to wriggle through.

The zeal to repress has become quite counterproductive, building up
the wealth and criminal reach of the drug barons who have become so
powerful that they often have a political influence that distorts,
even threatens, good governance.

By all accounts their influence is growing in most parts of the world
and the various types of control - from Europe's tolerance of soft
drugs but toughness on hard, to China's rigorous policy on executing
dealers - are clearly not working.

At least in Hong Kong there is a reasonably informed and intelligent
debate.

In China, as in many parts of America and Europe, debate is barely
tolerated. Here it is understood that opium is not heroin and hashish
is not crack.

Of course, heroin addiction is in another league than opium. Toward
the end of the nineteenth century heroin, a derivative of opium, was
discovered by a German chemist working at the Bayer Company - the same
laboratories that gave us aspirin. It is heroin that can cut an addict
to pieces faster than any other drug, although let it be said that
many people who have taken heroin moderately have lived quite
productive and acceptable lives; witness the poet Coleridge.

Hard drugs maybe forbidden today in Britain and Hong Kong - dare we
ask how would Sherlock Holmes have had the insights to catch his
criminals in today' s London without his white powder? - But at least,
unlike America, there is no longer any debate about its medicinal
uses. This is why it is probably best to die from some painful cancer
in a British hospice, as my mother did, one of the few countries to
allow the use of heroin as a pain suppressive, the strongest
painkiller of them all.

The truth is that neither China with its millennia of centralized
government nor the US with its technological prowess is a match for
the drug traders.

The tough policies of China, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, who
execute minor traffickers, have rarely touched the big barons.

We either do what Mao did - allow our governments to be simply
totalitarian on this issue and implement a scorched earth policy or we
legalize opium and other drugs to break the back of the underworld
trade. We then deal with addiction by educational and medical means.
It is the present and almost universal in between that is so
unsatisfactory and so dangerous.