HANOI, Vietnam (Reuter) A U.N. group said Friday it had agreed to launch a threeyear program to try to brake the spread of HIV/AIDS among drug abusers in Vietnam.

"HIV/AIDS prevention targeted for urban youth is a pressing mission to be achieved since intravenous drug abuse is spreading among young people in urban areas and provincial towns at an alarming rate," the U.N. International Drug Control Program (UNDCP) said in a statement.

It said the sharing of contaminated syringes and needles among injecting drug users was responsible for more than 60 percent of the confirmed HIV cases in Vietnam.

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VNA said more than 1,300 drugrelated cases were uncovered, with 186.2 kg (410 lb) of opium, 1.7 kg (3.8 lb) of heroin and 23.5 kg (51.8 lb) of marijuana seized between August 1 and September 1. ``The police are spearheading a drug fight aimed at school pupils and students in September,'' VNA said.

Last month the government set up a National Drug Committee to boost its drive against trafficking and abuse of illegal narcotics.

Vietnam's long land border and coastline makes the country an easy transit route for traffickers from the opium poppygrowing areas of Laos and Burma.

There was no word on the Hanoi street value of the seized drugs. But the heroin alone would sell at wholesale prices in New York for about $1.2 million.

07:48 090897

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XA LINH, Vietnam, Aug 17 (Reuter) Tran Khuong Dan is not your normal physician. His father was an opium addict, his brother died of an overdose. Tragedy led him to explore the mindbending postwar world of Saigon opium dens.

``You know, after the war ended, hundreds of wounded veterans were addicted to the painkiller morphine,'' he says. ``The idea of finding an antidrug addiction medicine came into my mind during the time I lived in a neighbourhood of drug addicts in Saigon.''

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FEATUREVietnam doctor uses herbs to fight drugs

By Adrian Edwards XA LINH, Vietnam (Reuter) Tran Khuong Dan is not your usual physician. His father was an opium addict, his brother died of an overdose tragedies that led him to explore the mindbending postVietnam War world of Saigon opium dens. ``You know, after the war ended hundreds of wounded veterans were addicted to the painkiller morphine,'' he said. ``The idea of finding an antidrug addiction medicine came into my mind during the time I lived in a neighborhood of drug addicts in Saigon.'' Dan turned himself into an addict and experienced for himself the cravings associated with opium or heroin addiction as well as the torment of withdrawal. He sold his home and went to live among tribal groups in northern Vietnam where he sought an answer to addiction in traditional herbal remedies among communities where opium had been grown for decades. Fifteen years after that quest began, the 55yearold Dan may have found a cure, with potential implications for addicts worldwide. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) announced in June it was stepping up testing of the medicine that Dan created, a fierytasting brown syrup named Heantos. Roy Morey, UNDP's Washington director, told a news conference the medicine had already been tested on 3,000 Vietnamese addicts. He said trials had shown a high degree of success and reported extraordinary results with only about a 30 percent rate of readdiction and minimal sideeffects. FOLLOWUP STUDIES IN U.S., VIETNAM Full testing will require two more years but followup studies are under way in both Vietnam and the United States by the Vietnamese government and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. ``It's very exciting,'' Laura Dillon of UNDP's Hanoi office said. ``I'm told normal withdrawal from addiction can feel like thousands of maggots crawling up your legs. It drives people mad. Heantos seems to avoid those effects.'' In Hoa Binh some 40 miles west of Hanoi, nervous heroin addicts arrive at a small rehabilitation center to begin carefully supervised treatment. One is a young Hanoi taxi driver, a group notorious for its use of drugs, who breaks down in tears as he is searched in front of foreign reporters. Patients who have received treatment declare the process a success. ``I no longer have cravings since I took Heantos,'' said Le Ngoc Binh, a young woman who was a heroin addict until June. ``Now I can't think of drugs. If I do it makes me vomit.'' Doctors say the medicine is delivered in two doses. The first eliminates withdrawal symptoms and leaves patients able to abstain within a week. The second is taken a month later to prevent readdiction. The treatment is said to have a quick effect on addicts to heroin, cocaine and some addictive medicines. For opium users the process is slower. The medicine is nonaddictive and so far, apart from problems cited by some patients in sleeping during the first course, few sideeffects have been noted. In Vietnam, the cost is typically around $30 per person, about a third of the cost of existing alternatives. ADDICT IS SKEPTICAL OF CLAIMS Fifty miles away in Xa Linh, a poor village near the Laos border, 63yearold Hang A Trang scoops opium paste into a pipe, holds it over an oillamp flame in a dimly lighted room, inhales and lies back in ecstasy. The image is straight out of a 19th century East Asia of opium dens and crazed addicts, but for thousands of people across the thinly policed and ancient world of northern Indochina it remains a reality. ``I used to plant opium to earn money but I used it as a medicine and became hooked,'' said the addict of 34 years, who added that he has little faith in medicines and believes he would suffer a relapse if he tried. For the scientists examining Heantos the skepticism may be of a more professional nature, but it underlies key questions about a treatment that, if it lives up to its almost mythical billing, could affect lives around the world. Estimates of the cost of drug abuse in the United States alone range from $70 billion to $80 billion a year for treatment, crime associated with drug addiction and the cost of AIDS, which can be transmitted by users sharing needles. Dan, however, says he is not interested in the possible money. ``I'm a doctor. All I want is to cure people,'' he said. ^REUTER@

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Guards trafficking drugs to prisoners, insider says: Whistleblower fears for his life

By: Dianne Rinehart

A prison guard at Fraser Regional Correctional Centre said Wednesday an investigation that found correction officers were dealing drugs to inmates and providing them with weapons was shut down by the government because it was ``too hot to handle.''

Ronald Leskun headed up a team of three officers at the centre assigned to determine how inmates were receiving drugs and how to prevent it.

But Leskun said in an interview that the investigative team was disbanded in February, after discovering that prison guards were the main source of drugs such as heroin and cocaine.

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June 25, 1997

WASHINGTON Almost 25 years after withdrawing its defeated troops from Vietnam, the United States is welcoming Vietnamese scientists to its shores hoping they can help Washington win its $16 billion a year war against drugs.

Nine Vietnamese scientists are visiting here this week as part of a major international study to determine whether an herbal compound developed by traditional healers in Vietnam can actually cure drug addiction.

The medication, Heantos, has apparently produced sensational results in Vietnam where it has been tested on some 4,000 drug addicts. It will now undergo rigorous trials that meet top international standards in a collaboration between Vietnam's National Center for Natural Science and Technology (NCNST) Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, one of the top U.S. institutes dealing with drug addiction, and the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) here.

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By Evelyn Leopold

UNITED NATIONS, June 12 (Reuter) The United Nations is stepping up testing of an herbal medicine that Vietnamese doctors believe can cure heroin, opium or cocaine addiction in anywhere from three days to about a month.

Roy Morey, the Washington director of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), told a news conference on Thursday the medicine, known as Heantos and containing 13 traditional herbs, had been already been tested on 3,000 Vietnamese addicts.

It is taken in liquid doses for three to five days and then in tablet form for another month. UNDP announced last month in Hanoi that it was contributing $500,000 to the project.

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MAGANSETT, N.Y.Last week, Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt lumbered out of the legal jungle like one of those dinosaurs in "The Lost World," a vestige of a political Paleolithic Age when we were told that we were in great danger and only drastic measures could save us. Twentyfive years ago, Pratt, a former leader of the militant Black Panthers of the '60s and '70s, was convicted of robbing and then killing a Santa Monica schoolteacher. The damning witness at his trial was a Panther associate and rival who testified that Pratt had confessed the crime to him. Now, however, it appears there was a slight problem: At the time, the witness was an LAPD informant with four felony pleas on his record. As a result, a judge has now ordered a new trial. How times have changed. Pratt may just be the last victim of the old FBI mentality that infected so many lawenforcement agencies over the last 40 years, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation seemed able to destroy its enemies with cool dispatch and leave no traces. Today, of course, the FBI is seen as anything but efficient. After the fiascoes at Ruby Ridge and Waco; after letting the Unabomber slip through its fingers for more than a decade; after an agent was convicted of treason; after the recent Justice Department report condemning practices at the vaunted FBI lab, and after an FBI van full of munitions was stolen last week, the bureau seems more of a threat to itself than to our civil liberties. But the difference between the FBI of then and the FBI of now is not only a measure of its devolution. It is also a gauge of how government itself has changed and how our confidence in its effectiveness has eroded. To anyone growing up in the '50s, the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover was the stuff of legend. No criminal escaped the bureau's vigilance. Agents were brilliant, courageous and athletic; and Hoover himself seemed a paragon of virtuea man who selflessly fought to protect his country. For a time, he was mentioned as presidential timber. This had not come about without some effort. Back in the early '30s, when marauders like John Dillinger, Alvin Karpis, Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde roamed the country robbing banks, kidnapping and leaving a swath of destruction behind, many Americans demanded to know why the FBI was taking so long to catch them. The bureau was widely regarded as inept, and Hoover was routinely called onto the carpet by Congress. Infuriated, he redoubled the bureau's efforts to nab the desperadoes and seized credit for captures when local police were responsible. Though it may have seemed he was waging an anticrime campaign, Hoover was really conducting a publicrelations campaign. He wrote articles and books extolling the bureau. He cooperated with Hollywood on polishing the bureau's image, with films like "GMen." And he cultivated journalists by putting them on his "special correspondents" list and feeding them information. Columnists and commentators like George Sokolsky, Fulton Lewis Jr., Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons and, most important, Walter Winchell all became press agents for Hoover, championing the FBI and lambasting its enemies. Indeed, Hoover devoted so much time to his PR effort that one could justly have said the FBI's real purpose was image and crimefighting was only a means to this end.

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HANOI, Vietnam (Reuter) The United Nations warned Vietnam Thursday that drug trafficking and drug abuse would thrive during the country's social and economic transformation if effective steps were not taken to stamp them out.

Delivering its message as the dust was still settling from the dramatic trial and conviction of 22 heroin smugglers in Hanoi, the United Nations said it was high time for Vietnam to create a central coordination body for narcotics control.

``With the rapid economic and social changes...in Vietnam the risk of increased drug problems is very real unless effective countermeasures are put in place,'' said Joern Kristensen, head of the U.N. Drug Control Program (UNDCP) in Hanoi.

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The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said the medication known as HEANTOS had been applied effectively as a therapy in Vietnam, where there are an estimated 185,000 addicts.

But its claims still needed to be reviewed, verified and substantiated in compliance with international standards before its use on a wider scale and outside Vietnam could be authorised.

``Further research on HEANTOS is critical as drug abuse is one of the most pervasive social problems facing countries throughout the world,'' UNDP Deputy Resident Representative in Hanoi Nicholas Rosellini said in a statement.

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The Hanoi People's Court also sentenced eight to life imprisonment and six to prison terms ranging from one to 20 years at the end of Vietnam's largest drugs trial, which lasted 11 days.

The justended session of Vietnam's National Assembly amended the country's penal code to stiffen punishments for drugrelated crimes, with death sentences to be meted out to those possessing or trafficking 100 grams or more of heroin.

The 22 persons standing trial included eight senior police officers, three border guard officers, and a Laotian.

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HANOI, Vietnam (Reuter) A Vietnamese police captain facing trial on drugtrafficking charges has vowed to expose some ``extremely important people'' during the hearing this week in Hanoi, a newspaper said Monday.

``In the court, I will declare who has betrayed me and also I will expose some extremely important people ...,'' the Lao Dong newspaper quoted Interior Ministry Capt. Vu Xuan Truong as telling investigators ahead of the May 2 trial.

Accepting that he could face a firing squad, Truong said he would disclose the information in exchange for an amnesty from a death sentence for his wife and brother, who also stand accused.

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CHOCOLATE LOVER'S PAGE

http://bc.emanon.net:80/chocolate

Now that there's scientific proof chocolate has "canabanoids" in it that can make you high, what's going to happen to the war on drugs? That's just one bite from Chocolate Talk, a zine on this luscious bon bon of a site. Links to online chocolate shops and other tasty resources, find new uses for chocolate, or just click and drool.

VOTER INFORMATION SERVICES

http://www.vis.org

Getting involved in the political process is as easy as clicking and pointing. This Massachusetts nonprofit organization rates the U.S. Congress and tracks the individual voting records of members of Congress. Their support for special interest groups is also recorded.

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It's been a record winter for snowfall in Fargo, N.D. As spring settles in, the Red River is certain to swell, threatening the tidy homes and industrial shops that line its banks. [MEMPHIS COMMERCIAL APPEAL, PAY PER VIEW, 705 words, $1.00]

WARRANTLESS DRUG SEARCH VIOLATED MAN'S RIGHTS

Racine County drug agents who entered a man's home and searched for marijuana and drug paraphernalia without a warrant or his verbal OK violated his constitutional rights, an appeals court ruled Wednesday. [SAINT PAUL PIONEER PRESS, PAY PER VIEW, 360 words, $1.00]

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Story of Vietnam: pointless dying demanded by American political passions

Sometimes the most startling stories barely make it into the papers. Here's one that ran Feb. 15 on an inside page of The New York Times. It discloses that Lyndon Johnson, as early as 1964, viewed the Vietnam War as pointless.

The twist that makes this a tale for a great fiction writer is Johnson's belief that, pointless though it was, Congress would destroy him if he tried to pull out. So he didn't, and so the war destroyed him instead. And gave us all that death.

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