TIMEasia.com: Chinese Junk

There are 7 million to 12 million drug users nationwide, and more htan 80% are aged under 35

MARK LEONG/MATRIX FOR TIME

COVER STORY
Drugs were the scourge of pre-communist China. Today the country is using again—and producing too

KETAMINE
China's other white powder

GRAPHIC
The Growing Menace

Chinese Junk
Drugs were the scourge of pre-communist China. Today the country is using again—and producing too

The poppy plantations of the Dongxiang are small and cultivated furtively in village courtyards or on the tops of forbidding mountains. Villagers with AK-47s guard the flowers, but few busts happen, in part because the police are frightened. Last year, at least a dozen undercover agents died in drug-related violence in the Dongxiang badlands. Many local police are also complicit in the trade, taking a cut of the profits as payment for their silence. One dealer's uncle—a top gun in Sanjiaji's police force—has found another way to cash in on the drug trade: for a fee, he offers guided tours of the poppy fields. Corruption has become systemic. Even though the central government has targeted Gansu in its latest antidrug campaign, a $9,000 bribe can buy a dealer out of a death sentence. "In China, if you have money, you can escape anything. Even death," says a pusher in Lanzhou, who boasts of having bribed his way out of a jail term.

When local police do need to meet arrest quotas handed down by Beijing, many simply pull out an impounded stash, hand it to a dealer they know and pick up the junkies who come knocking. Arresting users is more lucrative than nabbing pushers because junkies have to pay for their forced rehabilitation in government-run detox centers. Three years ago, according to a police informer, Lanzhou cops handed a bag of white powder to a beggar who lived by the train station and gave him $3 to take it across town. When the vagrant arrived at his destination, they pulled him in for drug trafficking and sentenced him to life imprisonment. That month, the cops received an award for having arrested a record number of dealers.

There are, of course, some police who genuinely try to curb the flood of heroin. Yunnan, for instance, had a banner year of legitimate busts in 2001, arresting more than 13,700 people on drug-related charges. "They've realized that stopping people at official border checkpoints isn't the way to catch the big dealers," says a United Nations official based in Bangkok, "so they're focusing instead on finding the secret jungle routes where drugs slip into China." In some rural hamlets in Gansu, police drug sweeps have been so successful that the enclaves are known as "widows villages," as only female relatives of jailed or executed men remain.

But executing dozens of husbands hardly stems the flow of drugs. Route 212, a snaking stretch of cracked asphalt from Sanjiaji to Lanzhou, is one of the most heavily trafficked drug trails in China. Cops occasionally block the road to check gas tanks and tires for hidden heroin, but they generally seem listless, energized only when they need to meet a government arrest quota. There are simply too many small-time dealers to catch in China, as the nation's vigorous brand of capitalism has caused even the drug market to break its long-held monopolies. In 1990 the average drug seizure netted 750 grams; six years later, the amount had dropped to only 60 grams, as thousands more petty pushers entered the market. "Even if I stop 10 or 100 cars, there will be 1,000 more out there," laments an undercover cop who says he collars two dealers a day. "Sometimes, I don't see the point in trying."

That sense of helplessness is mirrored in Gansu's overburdened courts. A district court judge estimates he presided over 200 cases last year in which dealers were sentenced to 15 years or more behind bars. The youngest defendant was only eight years old. But the judge confides that up to half of the cases may have been trumped up by crooked cops. Gansu receives a big chunk of antidrug money from the central government, he explains, but the funds are tied to prodigious arrest figures. "If arrests are low one month," says the judge, "then the next month, it's easy for police to arrest someone, add white powder to the heroin and make the charges more serious." Not surprisingly, narcotics arrests in Gansu have surged in the past five years—and so has the money Beijing has funneled to the province. "Drug enforcement in Gansu is a joke," says a local dealer. "How do you think the police here afford their big banquets and nice cars? This is a poor province. The only money we have comes from drugs and everybody chases it, from farmers to policemen."

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