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Enter the dragon -- or the tail of the dragon, as heroin is often referred to. Huge quantities of opium are grown and processed in the Golden Triangle area of Burma and Laos across the border from northeastern Thailand. But the drugs need a way out from these landlocked mountain valleys. Corrupt officers in the Thai army used to facilitate shipments down through Thailand, but efforts have been made -- at the insistence of the U.S. -- to stop that.

So the traffickers have been seeking alternate routes. Southern China is one of them, although the Chinese are fairly aggressive in applying the death penalty to drug traffickers. And now one of the big channels for heroin is through Laos and into Vietnam, around the city of Vinh (the world's ugliest city, for anyone who has been there. Completely destroyed by U.S. bombers during the war because it stood at the top of the Ho Chi Minh trail, the city was rebuilt in nightmarish Stalinist concrete design by a bunch of East German architects who were clearly taking some hallucinogenic drugs worse than heroin at the time). From Vinh, the heroin can be loaded onto ships in small coastal ports and transported off to the U.S.

It seems that at the beginning, greedy police officers thought this would be a good way of earning money, taking a cut from the traffickers. What they didn't realize at the time was that there would be considerable leakage -- a portion of the consignments would stay in Vietnam, for sale locally. And that is what happened, arriving at an explosive time -- young people with suddenly elevated expectations of life, but with nowhere to take all their energy.

So now, Saigon has a huge population of heroin addicts with entire parks in the city given over to junkies at night. Small alleyways are littered with needles, and the drug can be bought on street corners and around nightclubs almost at will. In the discotheques, at least half the crowd dancing is likely to be on ecstasy -- in the bathrooms there are signs saying drugs are forbidden by the management, but nobody seems to care. AIDS has also shot up with the needle users, and many of the female drug addicts have turned to prostitution to finance their habit, which of course only makes the HIV infection rates even worse.

The government has belatedly realized things are getting out of control -- this week a court in Nam Dinh handed down 11 death sentences to men found guilty of trafficking 250 kilograms of heroin, along with 289 kilos of opium. In the first nine months of last year 18,000 people were arrested for drug smuggling in Vietnam, and 60 of them were sentenced to death.

But the drug habit, once established, is hard to shake, as the U.S. has found out to its detriment. Vietnam may not be open to the benefits of globalization and world trade -- but it has certainly fallen victim to one of the major evils of international drug syndicates.

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