Source: Reuter; 4/22/97 China launches war on rampant drug crime By Mure Dickie BEIJING (Reuter) China has launched a campaign against rampant drug crime, vowing to crack down on addicts, traffickers and local authorities who allow growers to tend their illegal crops, officials said Tuesday. A rising international tide of narcotics crime has helped create the most serious drugs crisis in China since the trade was all but wiped out in the early 1950s, the People's Daily said. Beijing, which frequently executes drug traffickers, has ordered a nationwide campaign that will run until September. It will aim to curb drug crimes through tougher legal action, expanded propaganda and tighter organization, said the newspaper, mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party. ``We must first make full use of all the weapons of the law to strike hard at criminal drug activities and resolutely hold back their increasingly rampant spread,'' it said. Some local officials did not realize the seriousness of the drug crisis while others even approved of drug production, the Xinhua news agency quoted the National Committee of Narcotics Control as saying. ``It was discovered that some grassrootslevel authorities have privately given the green light to drug growers, which has stimulated the spread of drug production and use,'' it said. The antidrug campaign will be combined with China's ``Strike Hard'' war on crime, which had already targeted drug offenses, a narcotics commitee official told Reuters. China's Communists ended centuries of widespread drugs use in the years after their 1949 revolution, but they have seen the trade in heroin, opium and illegal stimulants surge back as economic reforms have loosened oncestrict social controls. More open borders have allowed drugs to flow across China from the ``Golden Triangle'' opium growing region that straddles parts of Burma, Thailand and Laos and on to markets in the West. Increasing urban affluence has turned coastal cities into new centers of demand, while thousands of surplus rural laborers have become hooked on drugs either smuggled into the country or grown on the remote and temperate hills of southwest China. By the end of 1995, officials had registered 520,000 illegal drug users in 1,600 towns and counties, the People's Daily said. 10:41 042297