Pubdate: Sun, 11 Apr 1999
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 1999 Mercury Center
Contact:  http://www.sjmercury.com/
Author: Mark McDonald, Mercury News Vietnam Bureau

VIETNAM'S DEEPENING ADDICTION 

Government Toughens Penalties To Fight Surging Drug Use

MUONG XEN, Vietnam -- These are the spare and daily facts of Luc Van Thanh's
young life -- a frantic mother, a brother on death row, a pair of plastic
sandals, some soiled pajamas, and the sweats and shivers of a heroin addict
in a detox center.

Just down the muddy mountain road, a village leader has an addiction of his
own, an addiction with an undertow so powerful that by late morning, when
Hoc Thanh Son has smoked up all of his cheap Sea Bird cigarettes, he takes
out a sticky black ball of opium, places it expertly into a bamboo pipe, and
smokes it right in front of some visiting government officials.

"I am," he tells them drowsily, "a pathetic man."

These are two of the faces -- one young, one not -- that are the most
terrifying to Vietnam's rulers these days. More than political dissidents or
corrupt politicians, it's the faces of new drug addicts, particularly young
heroin junkies and new AIDS patients, that are the most alarming.

"What most worries the government is that the number of hard-drug users is
increasing by 10 percent per year," says Jens Hannibal, head of the United
Nations Drug Control Program in Vietnam. "That's indicative of the spread of
this thing."

Hannibal says government statistics about the number of drug users are
wholly unreliable. But nationwide, according to police data, drug-related
criminal cases increased 30 percent from 1997 to '98. And in the first three
months of this year, such cases were up 65.6 percent over the previous three
months.

Harsh new laws

Hoping to eradicate cultivation and trafficking in opium and heroin, the
Hanoi government, along with a U.N. pilot project here in Nghe An province,
has persuaded farmers to rip out their lucrative poppies and raise corn,
potatoes, plum trees and livestock. At the other end of the drug pipeline,
the government has imposed harsh new drugs laws that include the death penalty.

"Recently we've seen a big increase in heroin being used by our young
people," said Police Col. Bui Xuan Bien, a director of the Vietnam National
Drug Control Committee. "At first they were inhaling, but the more recent
development is injecting."

Addicts are everywhere in Vietnam. They're in a downtown park in Hanoi,
sprawled in the grass under a statue of Lenin. They're in the hip nightclubs
of Ho Chi Minh City, paying 50,000 dong ($3.60) for a wedge of folded paper
that holds enough powdered heroin to get them high. And they're in the seedy
shooting galleries of Haiphong. Seventy young men were recently arrested
there in a raid, and all 70 later tested positive for HIV, the virus that
causes AIDS.

The new addicts also live in Vietnam's rural villages and hamlets, and some
localities are so inundated that they're having trouble finding enough
healthy young men to fulfill their military-draft quotas.

Thanh, 19, and Son, 44, are both from rural Nghe An province, one of the
poorest areas in Vietnam. Famed as the birthplace of Ho Chi Minh, the
province has long been notorious for its huge plantings of high-quality
opium poppies.

Thanh quit school after the seventh grade and, contemptuous of his parents'
farming life, got a job on one of the rattletrap buses that yo-yo up and
down Highway 7. The buses carry passengers -- and drugs -- between the port
city of Vinh and the mountain towns along the Laotian border.

"I liked smoking heroin," he says, claiming he never injected. "Most of my
friends smoke or inhale. There's lots of heroin users now. Lots."

Thanh became addicted eight months ago, and last month his family finally
checked him into the prison-like rehab center in Muong Xen. The doctor here
has been giving him herbal teas and acupuncture treatments to ease the
withdrawal. Thanh will be extremely lucky if he doesn't relapse.

After detox, re-addiction

"Detoxing is the easy part," says Dr. Dao Xuan Khoi, a Border Guard officer
and the director of the center. "Our problem here is the lack of jobs.
There's no work, and now that we're in the age of heroin, more than 80
percent get re-addicted."

Thanh's older brother, Thaoi, 29, was caught earlier this year with nearly a
pound of heroin on him. He was sentenced to death and will be facing a
firing squad any day now. Thaoi's wife and two young daughters will attend
the execution, but his mother will not.

"I cannot watch -- I am dying myself inside," says his mother, Kha thi Van,
60, a member of the Black Thai ethnic minority group.

Van says her parents were subsistence rice farmers who used opium "to help
them forget the pain" in their bones and joints. "We never grew opium," she
says. "We got it from the (neighboring) Hmong commune. We traded salt,
pepper and our weavings for it."

Van fears for her sons, of course, and she clearly remembers the last time
she was so fearful -- "When the planes flew over me, dropping bombs while I
was farming."

"Like another war"

"Now we have heroin," she say. "Now it's like we have another war."

Hoc Thanh Son missed the war with the Americans, but in 1986, when he came
back to Khe Tang commune after his army service, he found a desperate
poverty awaiting him. He was elected leader of the commune, which numbers
310 people, most of them from the Kamu ethnic minority, but Son soon slipped
into the opium addiction that has cost him a home, all of his savings and
most of his pride.

Last year, he says, there were 26 adult opium addicts in his commune. Now
there are 46. Three are teenagers, three are over 70, the rest are
middle-aged men.

"We're poor so we can't afford heroin, but opium is cheap," says Son, his
hand shaking as he pours green tea into some chipped blue cups. "We have
families here with several generations addicted to opium."

As Son prepares to smoke the second of his three daily bowls of opium, tears
well up in the eyes of one of his three children, a 15-year-old boy.

"I hate my father for smoking opium," the boy says softly, but loud enough
for his father to hear across the room.

"Yes, even my little 6-year-old daughter is angry at me," says the father.
"I am so ashamed."

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