HEROIN, HIV FACTS OF LIFE IN CHINA

In Butuo, A Town Of 10,000, As Many As 20 Die Each Year From
Overdoses

BUTUO, China -- By day, Butuo is an ethnic backwater, where women in
long, embroidered blue skirts tote baskets filled with chunks of pork,
and men in full-length capes carry bundles of twigs, fuel for indoor
fire pits.

It is a place populated by China's large but impoverished Yi ethnic
minority, where donkey carts wind past simple red mud houses dressed
for winter, hanging heavy with chains of red pepper and yellow corn.

But late at night, scenes of Butuo are drawn with a different palette.
Small groups of young men weave past the town's only intersection,
pitch black except for an eerie blue glow cast by incongruous
advertisements for mobile phones. Visitors are warned not to venture
outside.

At almost any time, the five unheated cells of the public security's
drug detoxification center are overflowing with addicts, many accused
of trafficking as well.

Located on the drug trafficking route that connects Myanmar, also
known as Burma, with China's northern cities, Butuo and other towns
near here have become havens for intravenous drug use and its stubborn
shadow, HIV.

Poor, uneducated youths use heroin as a cure for boredom, and have
also discovered that carrying drugs is an easy way to earn money.

In Butuo, a town of 10,000 in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture,
there are as many as 20 deaths each year from heroin overdoses, one
official estimated.

Hundreds of people probably carry the virus that causes AIDS, although
health officials have no money for testing.

"The spread of HIV here is worse every year," said Dr. Zhang Se'er of
the Butuo anti-epidemic station. "When we first saw it, in the mid-to
late '90s, it used to be just from drugs, but now there's sexual
transmission as well."

Initially, officials in Liangshan tried to deny and ignore that HIV
had arrived, a response still typical in much of China.

But by 1999, with the virus rolling through their population and no
knowledge or money to control it, officials decided to try a radically
new tack: They admitted to a serious AIDS problem.

They contacted Doctors Without Borders and requested assistance in
setting up prevention programs, which now focus on drug addicts and
prostitutes. This month, they allowed a foreign reporter to attend the
sessions, where a number of people had never heard of the virus.

"At first, we didn't want to talk about it -- we were filled with
worries -- and we certainly didn't want to check to see how bad it
was," said Liu Yan, deputy commissioner of Liangshan prefecture.

"But then we realized that if we didn't do anything, 300 people could
quickly become 3,000. AIDS is a global problem. These places are poor.
They need help."

From the standpoint of drugs and AIDS, Butuo's location is its most
glaring liability. It sits as a crucial way station on a major route
for both legal goods and drugs, exactly halfway between Chengdu in
Sichuan province and Kunming in Yunnan, which borders the drug-growing
regions of Myanmar and Laos.

In short, drugs are readily available.

"I was introduced to drugs by friends right here in Butuo," said a
man, 25, with downcast eyes and wearing a dusty dark suit jacket, who
would give only his surname, Suge.

Squatting on the dirt floor of the detoxification center, rubbing his
hands over a heated coil, Suge recalled how he was spending as much as
100 yuan a day on heroin, or about $12, at the time of his arrest. The
average yearly income in the county is 800 yuan, or $96.

Many of the poor, desperate people who take up work as low-level
couriers, eventually become addicts; others who start as addicts take
up trafficking to support their habit.

Although many addicts start by inhaling heroin, most quickly turn to
injection because it is the most economical way to achieve a high.
Sharing needles is another form of economy.

Nearly three years ago, a survey of people in drug detoxification here
found that 10 percent of Butuo's addicts were infected with HIV. There
has not been money for subsequent testing but the infection rate is
almost certainly much higher now.

Once AIDS enters a population of drug users who share needles, it
spreads with alarming speed. In the far western region of Xinjiang,
the rate of HIV infection among drug users rose to 40 percent from 10
percent between 1996 and 1997, for example.