TIMEasia.com: Chinese Junk

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 Municipal Mandatory Rehabilitation Center in the sand-swept, northwestern city of Yinchuan is a place for those who took the risk and lost. Most of the 200 male inmates have been through the cycle: addiction, arrest, detox, rearrest. Brother Wu was out buying dog food back in January when the Yinchuan cops came calling. A friend had been arrested a couple days earlier and had given authorities a list of his fellow junkies. After a urine test proved positive, Brother Wu was thrown into the rehab center for six months. There are 695 mandatory drug treatment centers in China, and last year they were home to 216,000 addicts. Another 56,000 repeat junkies were sent without trial to "detoxification-through-labor" camps. In these grim places, inmates toil 16-hour days making deceptively cheerful products: stuffed animals, Christmas ornaments, paper valentines. hiv is rife in the rehab centers; the government estimates that 69% of all Chinese aids patients are heroin users.

Still, life isn't all bad in some compulsory detox camps. Just half-an-hour after entering the rehab center, Brother Wu watched a fellow addict reach over the cinder-block wall and grab a bag held up by a bamboo pole. In it were several grams of white powder. "It's easier to score inside rehab centers than outside," says Brother Wu, pushing his dreadlocks out of his face. "Lots of people don't want to leave because it's a stable source of heroin." In another mandatory detox center in Chengdu, junkies had it even easier: they bought their smack directly from the guards themselves. Nevertheless, Brother Wu was relieved when family connections and a $960 bribe to the police shaved three months off his sentence. Still, the plentiful heroin inside the rehab centers means that even the central government admits that 90% of Chinese addicts relapse once they leave; that might be because they were never clean in the first place.

Even in rehab centers where drugs are less abundant, officials make little effort to address the physiological and psychological needs of a heroin-addicted brain. Junkies are treated as criminals, which does little to help them kick the habit. "All they tell you is that you're evil," says Brother Wu, "so you figure that once you get out you might as well be evil and start using again." There is no attempt to offer counseling once inmates return home. In Gansu, for instance, provincial officials explain with a straight face that after addicts complete a three-month detox program, they are considered cured for life. And the thousands of repeat inmates? "Ah, they just weren't trying hard enough," insists an antidrug official in Lanzhou, where government coffers are padded by the $1,000 fee thousands of addicts must shell out for their compulsory rehab. "It's their fault, not ours."

With drug addiction soaring nationwide, many Chinese have begun looking for alternatives to the dismal state-run detox centers. Expensive and unorthodox remedies alike have flooded the market. A doctor in Beijing claims to cure heroin addiction through acupuncture, but he's closemouthed about his actual success rate. A detox center in Yunnan's capital, Kunming, offers addicts a spoonful of herbal pills and a dose of boot-camp discipline. The camp commandant is a stern-faced former People's Liberation Army officer, but he admits that his camp's relapse rate exceeds 70%. In Guangdong, American-style clinics have opened up, offering junkies a manicure-and-methadone package. The price tag at some of these rehab retreats tops $5,000 for a two-week stay, but there, too, the re-addiction rate is more than 50%. "We see the same addicts over and over," says a counselor at a Guangdong rehab clinic. "If they don't come in for a while, we get worried that maybe they have been finally caught by the drug and are dead."

For most first-time junkies, heroin symbolizes freedom, not entrapment. Two decades ago, the average Chinese wasn't free to choose much of anything: what to do, where to go, what to think. Families required kids to remain at home and work in the local commune. The government, too, wanted China's citizens to stay put, so it could track their movements. Society was safe, yes, but straitjacketed. The economic reforms that began in the 1980s, though, sent millions of Chinese spilling into the cities. China's carefully ordered society fractured, with families that had lived in one village for centuries now scattering across the nation. Lost in China's teeming cities, many turned to drugs. For dealers, too, the temptation was irresistible. Nobody was watching, nobody cared what they sold. But now, for the junkies and dealers alike, it is too late to turn back.

When Lao Xu first tried heroin, he was a 19-year-old country kid blinded by Shanghai's neon. He thought he would get work in one of the city's gleaming skyscrapers, but he ended up dancing for cash in a darkened nightclub. Heroin was another of Shanghai's surprises. He knew it was dangerous, but he tried it anyway. After all, a pale-faced dancer from far-off Gansu province needed something to make him hot in the capital of cool. And Lao Xu liked the social aspect of heroin, a bunch of guys sitting in a room, enjoying the rush and then the drowsy hours that followed. He missed his parents and his grandma, and here was a way to connect—a chemical club for China's displaced. But then one day he didn't need his friends around to enjoy his high. So he fired up the foil alone in the grungy bathroom of his tenement. "I started doing this because I wanted to be with friends," says Lao Xu. "Now I feel so alone."

Back in Lanzhou, Ah Hui went cold turkey, even attending church for a while to try to keep himself straight. But now he's sitting in room 602 of a grimy hotel, mesmerized as Xiao Jing, a sweet-faced wannabe actress, unloads her groceries. In one hand she holds a bag of fruit. In the other, a bag of heroin. They munch watermelon and watch as another junkie pours the heroin onto a 100-yuan note emblazoned with a portrait of Mao Zedong. The white powder lands smack on the Chairman's face. Ah Hui and Xiao Jing exhale and lean forward for what they say will be just one last hit. 4

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