Hanoi Is Willing To Return The Remains Of An Executed Canadian Woman To Her Family And Release Her Mother

HANOI - Vietnam is hoping to ease tensions with Canada by sending back the remains of an executed Canadian woman and considering the release of her sick mother, Vietnamese and Canadian officials said yesterday.

Canada froze ministerial-level relations after Nguyen Thi Hiep, a Canadian citizen, was executed on April 24 on a drug smuggling conviction.

Foreign Minister Nguyen Dy Nien sent a letter on Friday to his Canadian counterpart, Mr Lloyd Axworthy, saying that Hiep's crime -- smuggling 5.45 kg of heroin -- was serious and that her execution was "justified and correct".

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HANOI - Canada has slapped new sanctions on Vietnam and cut off all ministerial-level contacts following last week's execution of a Canadian woman charged with drug trafficking in Hanoi.

"We deplore this absolutely unacceptable conduct of the government of Vietnam," Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien told the House of Commons late Monday.

"We have taken all steps possible to make sure it (Vietnam) understands that such action cannot be acceptable and that the Canadian government absolutely condemns it."

Ottawa has already adamantly protested the April 25 execution of Nguyen Thi Hiep, a Canadian citizen born in Vietnam, who was shot by a firing squad in Hanoi on heroin trafficking charges.

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Death by firing squad for woman caught trying to smuggle heroin is seen as demonstration of the country's crackdown on drugs

HANOI -- Vietnam has demonstrated its determination to wage a tough fight against drug trafficking with the unprecedented execution of a Canadian woman convicted of drug trafficking.

Nguyen Thi Hiep, convicted of trying to smuggle five kilograms of heroin out of the country four years ago, was executed by firing squad here at dawn on Tuesday.

She was the first holder of a Western passport to be put to death in Vietnam and her execution was seen by observers here as a signal of an intensifying crackdown in the war on drugs.

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MORE than 600 convicted Vietnamese drug addicts confined at a detoxification centre in Ho Chi Minh City attempted a mass breakout on Tuesday in protest at overcrowding, officials said yesterday.

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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.

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MUONG XEN, Vietnam -- Up, way up, tucked into the wild green yonder of Vietnam, that's where the opium grows best.

Ethnic Hmong farmers have been growing opium poppies in these limestone mountains for hundreds of years, making medicinal opium for themselves, then selling or bartering the rest. Normally the farmers would have just finished the spring harvest about now, clearing an acre of poppies here, a half-acre there.

Officials claim success

But this year -- if you believe the government -- there was not a single poppy grown here along the border with Laos. Police and drug-control officials give the credit to a vigorous campaign of eradication and crop replacement in the upper reaches and rocky ramparts of Nghe An province.

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HANOI, Jan 6 (Reuters) - Vietnam sentenced 49 people to death and arrested 18,000 last year on drug-related crimes as the country wrestles with a rising drug problem, local media reported on Wednesday.

"The number of detections was 35 percent higher than 1997, while those subject to litigation increased by 142.2 percent," the official Vietnam News said.

The number arrested included 21 foreign nationals, the daily newspaper said.

Truong Huu Quoc, head of the Police Ministry's drug control department, said 1,135 kg (2,503 lb) of opium, 60,000 opium doses, 56.57 kg (125 lb) of heroin and 103,000 doses of other unnamed narcotics were seized, the newspaper reported.

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HANOI, Jan. 6 (Kyodo) -- Vietnamese police last year detected 9,000 drug-smuggling and trafficking cases, and arrested 18,600 people involved, a newspaper reported Wednesday.

The figures in 1997 were 7,000 cases and 14,000 people arrested, the English-language daily Vietnam News said, quoting Truong Huu Quoc, director of the Drug Control Department of the Ministry of Public Security.

Quoc said the police last year confiscated 1,135 kilograms of opium, 56.57 kg of heroin, and 398 kg of cannabis, most of it smuggled into Vietnam.

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VIETNAM -- In Hanoi An ever-increasing flow of heroin through the north is being blamed for a HIV infections that now span the whole country.

United Nations officials yesterday confirmed that the virus that leads to AIDS had now been registered in all Vietnam's 61 provinces since it was first detected in Ho Chi Minh City eight years ago.

Among the latest cases is one involving a heroin user from Ha Giang in the far north - until now the only HIV-free province. The sufferer may have caught the disease elsewhere, however.

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WASHINGTON--'Gray is the color of truth." So said McGeorge Bundy, 31 years ago, in a speech about the Vietnam War. Historical truths are always ambiguous, never more so than those that deal with a failed war.

Most Americans long ago concluded that President Lyndon B. Johnson and his key aides--the Bundy brothers (McGeorge and William P.), Robert S. McNamara and other bright lights of the establishment--stumbled into that quagmire out of hubris and ignorance.

Now, new archival evidence suggests that the truth is far more painful.

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HANOI, Nov 26 (Reuters) - Drug abuse among Vietnam's youth is increasing dramatically, an official paper presented on Thursday said.

The paper, prepared for a two-day regional conference held in Hanoi on preventing drug abuse by Southeast Asian youth, said drug problems were penetrating the country's schools.

"Drug abuse among the youth is increasing dramatically. There are more than 100,000 drug addicts in Vietnam, of which 70 percent... are under 30 years of age," the paper, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, said.

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HANOI, Vietnam (Reuters) - Drug offences revolving around heroin are mounting in Vietnam and police drives against the narcotics trade remain burdened by inadequate laws and facilities, the country's anti-drugs chief said. "The size of the drug trafficking rings are becoming larger," Vu Hung Vuong, head of the national police anti-drug squad, told the official Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper in an interview published Thursday. "It's even more dangerous when they (traffickers) have connections with degraded elements in state offices and law-protection agencies," he added.

Vuong said drug abuse was growing among young people, who accounted for 70% of 132,000 heroin addicts in the communist-ruled country. - --- Checked-by: Richard Lake

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THE Vietnamese community had led a successful suburban battle in forcing major heroin syndicates from their traditional base in Brisbane's west, a community leader claimed yesterday.

John Vu, a settlement officer working for the Department of Immigration and welfare officer for the Vietnamese Community of Australia, said he was "proud" to announce Darn and Inala were no longer Queensland's heroin capitals.

He attributed the successful campaign to the establishment of Vietnamese liaison officers who dissolved the community's "code of silence" and acted as go-betweens for the Vietnamese community and police.

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HANOI (Reuters) -- Four people have been sentenced to death by firing squad for trafficking heroin through Vietnam from Laos, a court official said today.

The two Laotians and two Vietnamese were convicted in a four-day trial which ended on Friday morning, the official from the People's Court in the central province of Ha Tinh said.

Three other defendants, including two Laotians and two women, were handed life sentences. An eighth person was sentenced for five years, the official said.

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HANOI (Reuters) -- Four people have been sentenced to death by firing squad for trafficking heroin through Vietnam from Laos, a court official said today.

The two Laotians and two Vietnamese were convicted in a four-day trial which ended on Friday morning, the official from the People's Court in the central province of Ha Tinh said.

Three other defendants, including two Laotians and two women, were handed life sentences. An eighth person was sentenced for five years, the official said.

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A President and his general locked in a failed policy, unwilling to admit the war cannot be won. Lives lost. Billions wasted. Sound familiar?

As General Barry McCaffrey, the drug czar, calls for more troops and more weapons, the dispatches from the front tell us we’re still losing the war in spite of the body count.

If people aren’t in the streets yet, they may be after they read "Drug Crazy"

In 1978, Mike Gray wrote "The China Syndrome," the movie that blew the lid off the nuclear power industry. Now, "Drug Crazy" is about to do the same thing to the war on drugs.

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By HANOI, March 3 (Reuters) - Vietnam carried out its second major execution of the year on Tuesday before hundreds of people, in a grim demonstration of state resolve to punish abuses of power and drugs trafficking.

Vu Xuan Truong, a former police captain with the country's powerful Interior Ministry, and six accomplices -- including a woman -- were shot dead shortly before daybreak at an execution site on the outskirts of the capital Hanoi.

In a rare concession the authorities had bowed to a request by Truong on Monday that the killings be carried out before first light. Prison sources and other witnesses said the seven were woken in their cells at around 2:30 a.m. local time.

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A VIETNAMESE herbalist who gained worldwide acclaim for inventing a "miracle" cure for heroin addiction may have covered up the deaths of up to six patients in his care.

Health officials in Hanoi have evidence that a clinic run by Tran Khuong Dan bribed at least one family to bury their son's body without informing the authorities.

United Nations sources in New York - who have launched costly trials on the "cure" - told The Independent yesterday that they believe more cases are being investigated, yet testing on the drug is likely to continue.

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By Bob Groves, Staff Writer

For 2 1/2 days, Luis, a North Jersey businessman with a fouryear, $100aday heroin habit, lay flat on his back, asleep in an old hotel room in Hanoi, waking only to swallow capsules of Heantos, a Vietnamese herbal treatment touted as a quick cure for drug addiction.

After each dose, Luis fell back into a dead slumber. With him at all times was a Vietnamese doctor and Thomas Dodd, a former heroin addict and drug counselor from Paterson.

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For hundreds of years, the people of Vietnam have used opium as a sedative and cureall, and addiction, especially in rural areas, is common. But only in the last twenty years has the use of heroin, refined from opium, become a problem, especially in the cities. Now, however, there are signs of a possible surprise advance in confronting heroin addiction and the massive problems that go with it. By using traditional herbal medicines, the Vietnamese believe they may have found a quick and simple cure. And they've won some powerful international support in their new venture. Keith Graves has been to Vietnam to investigate...

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