THAILAND'S DRUG WAR COULD MIRROR IRAN'S FAILURE

CHIANG MAI, Thailand (Reuters) - "The Thai government's drugs policy: drop
dead."

Rojana, a heroin and methamphetamine addict at the age of 14 and a dealer
at 15, says the slogan on her T-shirt mirrors the real fear among many
Thais that a hard-line crackdown has targeted and killed the wrong people.

"People are scared. They're going after small-time dealers instead of
solving the problem at the source," said Rojana, now in rehab, the bruises
from injecting faded gray on her forearms.

Vowing to halt a yearly inflow of one billion methamphetamine pills from
neighboring Myanmar, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a former policeman,
launched a 90-day anti-drugs crusade on Feb. 1.

The aim was to rid the country of the drug, called "ya ba" or crazy drug in
Thai, on which an estimated 2.5 million Thai users spend $2 billion each year.

By the beginning of May, security forces had arrested 58,000 drugs
traffickers and dealers, and the government had fired 1,300 civil servants
suspected of involvement with them.

Authorities say 1,612 dealers and traffickers were killed over three
months. Police say they killed only 37, in self defense, and attribute the
rest to gang warfare.

Human rights groups are incensed by what they call a policy of
extrajudicial killing. And groups campaigning for decriminalizing drug use
say the violence is typical of anti-drugs pogroms around the world and is
doomed to failure.

They advise the government to look at the case of Iran, which executed
hundreds of dealers in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 Islamic
revolution but later decided the policy was failing to cut drug abuse or
HIV/AIDS infection among users.

Iranian security forces make about 75 percent of the world's opium seizures
and have accounted for 50 percent of the heroin haul, at the cost of more
than 3,300 police lives in the war against drugs since 1979.

But Iranian officials say traffickers will always find new ways to dodge
crackdowns and protect a lucrative business, which supplies drugs to 1.5
million of Iran's 65 million people.

"Traffickers are up to date with government measures," Reza Sarrami, head
of Iran's drug treatment policy, told Reuters at a recent conference in
Chiang Mai, northern Thailand.

"If we work eight hours a day, they'll work 24 hours."

"DOING OUR JOB"

Destruction of opium poppy fields in Iran resulted in higher supply from
Afghanistan. When transporting opium became more hazardous, use of its more
lucrative and easily packaged refined form, heroin, shot up. And then came
synthetic heroin.

Drug purity fell as prices rose, bringing new health risks.

Thai police are spotting the same trends. They say the price of
methamphetamines has quadrupled to about 300 baht ($7) a pill since
February. Glue and benzene sniffing is on the rise, and more hard-core
users, wanting a stronger fix to compensate for a jump in prices, are
switching to heroin or injecting a mixture of heroin and much less soluble
methamphetamine.

This will lead to more drug-related deaths and exacerbate the spread of
viruses such as HIV/AIDS and hepatitis, groups working with drugs users say.

This realization persuaded Iran to change tack eight years ago. Now half
its anti-drugs budget goes toward demand reduction.

Even the most conservative of Iran's religious leaders gave the green light
to dispensing methadone, a synthetic drug less addictive than heroin, and
pushing sales of sterile syringes.

Thailand, where involvement of Buddhist monasteries and community groups
was held as a model for treating drugs users, is now going in the opposite
direction, activists say.

"The crackdown has certainly resulted in the issue, and users, being forced
underground, making it difficult to reach out to them," said Ton Smits of
the Asian Harm Reduction Network, which works with drugs users.

The Thai government says it is promoting treatment alongside its get-tough
policy on dealers. It says 285,000 drugs users have reported for
rehabilitation since February.

But cases such as Rojana's serve to show the line between drug user and
small-time dealer is blurred, critics argue.

Yet public backing has given the government confidence to brush off
criticism of its heavy-handed measures.

"Human rights groups and non-government organizations are doing their own
jobs and we're doing our job," government spokesman Sita Divari said.

"I think the Thai public believes in a drug-free Thailand and the
government has been well supported."

One survey showed 90 percent of the population in favor of the crackdown.
But many are torn. With so much pressure on security forces to produce
results, seven out of 10 respondents feared arrest on trumped up charges.