BEIJING -- Some 17 drug traffickers were executed Saturday in China's southwestern Chongqing and eastern Shanghai municipalities to mark International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, state media reported. The Chongqing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court sentenced 16 criminals to death on charges of drug trafficking in a public trial Saturday, Xinhua news agency said.

Since last year the municipal public security department has cracked down on 30 heroin-smuggling cases, arresting 5,450 suspects and seizing a total of 135.5 kilograms of heroin.

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China has sentenced dozens of drug dealers to death ahead of the International Day Against Drug Abuse, despite a chorus of protests by human rights groups, state media has reported.

In the south-western city of Chongqing alone, 16 drug traffickers received death sentences in a public trial on Saturday, the designated international anti-drug day, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

In Shanghai, one man was executed for smuggling 1.8 kg of heroin into the city from Burma, it said.

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HONG KONG -- Hong Kong customs officials arrested five people for allegedly ordering marijuana by mail from Canada with a total local market value of about 2.1 million Hong Kong dollars ($361,859 Cdn), officials and news reports said.

The Sing Tao Daily newspaper reported Sunday that the cannabis was in boxes purporting to contain ginseng tea.

Officers found seven kilograms of the drug in several mail packages between April 8 and last Friday, Hong Kong's Customs and Excise Department said in a statement Saturday.

The government statement didn't provide further information on the five suspects arrested. It also didn't say whether they had been charged.

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A nationwide campaign to fight against illegal narcotics will be launched from April to September to attack the problem at the source, a senior public security official said on Friday.

Police are vowing to crack down on a number of drug rings and networks at home and abroad as well as demolishing large number of underground drug processing factories, Vice-Minister of Public Security Luo Feng told a televised conference.

Luo's words are a strong signal that China will continue its anti-drug fight this year.

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Three drug traffickers were sentenced to death on Friday in Guangzhou, capital of South China's Guangdong Province, said a Guangzhou Intermediate People's Court official.

And another six members of the same drug gang were sentenced to life in jail.

Sentenced to death were Yu Zhuoxiong, Guo Mingqing and Chen Yuhan.

Cheng Junyong, Fang Xiaochong, Lu Yaozong, Chen Xiongwen, Luo Jiaxiong and He Zhonghong were sentenced to life in jail.

Wen Qicheng, Liang Kairong and Li Yanfei, another three accomplices were sentenced to terms between 8 to 15 years.

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BEIJING - China said yesterday it is wrestling with deepening problems of domestic narcotics abuse and now has more than 1 million drug addicts.

Officials blamed soaring opium production in Afghanistan and the arrival of multinational drug gangs in China for some of the surge in drug use.

"The domestic consumption of narcotics is growing, and the kinds of drugs that are consumed have diversified," said Luo Feng, vice minister of Public Security, the nation's second-ranking counter-drug official.

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BEIJING - China said Monday that it's wrestling with deepening problems of domestic narcotics abuse and now has more than 1 million drug addicts.

Officials blamed soaring opium production in Afghanistan and the arrival of multinational drug gangs in China for some of the surge in drug use.

"The domestic consumption of narcotics is growing, and the kinds of drugs that are consumed have diversified," said Luo Feng, vice minister of Public Security, who is the nation's second-ranking counterdrug official.

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BEIJING (Kyodo) A 61-year-old Japanese man was sentenced to death by a district court in the Chinese city of Shenyang earlier this month on charges of trying to smuggle 1.25 kg of stimulant drugs from China to Japan, sources close to the case said Saturday.

The man, who has not been named, is the first Japanese to be given a death penalty that was not suspended in China, according to Japanese authorities.

Since being sentenced on Feb. 3, the defendant has appealed to a higher court and the hearing will take place within two months, the sources said, adding that his execution will take place relatively soon if the appeal court upholds the initial ruling.

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SHANGHAI (AP)--China has more than 1 million drug addicts, most of them under age 35 - a crisis that is costing the country billions of dollars a year, contributing to the spread of AIDS and hurting social stability, state media reported Friday.

Top law-enforcement officials meeting in Beijing reported that almost three-quarters of China's 1.05 million registered drug addicts at the end of 2003 were under age 35. Many were unemployed, migrant workers or farmers, the official Xinhua News Agency and state-run newspapers reported.

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A woman had been sentenced to death and her accomplice thrown in jail for life after police made the single largest haul of heroin in Beijing for more than 50 years, state media said.

The ruling was handed down on Ma Xiuqin, a 31-year-old woman from north-west Gansu province, and her accomplice Zhang Ganiang, 32, on Sunday by the Beijing No.1 Intermediate People's Court, the China Daily reported.

Their arrests came after police in Beijing received a tip-off last June from their Gansu colleagues about a drug ring operating between the two areas and subsequently arrested the women, seizing 13.2kg of heroin.

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Despite opium poppy eradication programmes and tougher drug suppression methods in Thailand and China, heroin and methamphetamines continue to pour out of the Wa-controlled high country of northern Burma

After a six-hour-long journey by taxi from Jinghong, the principal city of China's southern Yunnan province, we reached the border town of Mong Ah, where a bridge over the Namkam River separates it from Pangsang, the capital city of the Wa region in northern Burma.

Along the road that cuts through mist-shrouded mountains dotted with hilltribe villages, we came across some luxury right-hand drive cars, including the expensive Mitsubishi Pajero and Honda SUV models, with number plates bearing the initials "NW", for North Wa. This is in sharp contrast to a small army of motorcycles, motorised rickshaws, and noisy tractors and trucks that were conspicuous in all the towns we passed through. Local villagers must be wondering what kind of business the Pajero drivers do to possess such expensive vehicles.

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BEIJING -- With China taking its first real steps toward a full-scale public awareness campaign about AIDS this week, the degree of ignorance caused by past government denial is evident in the dazed expression of Zhao Pingyuan. Pedaling his bicycle along a narrow alleyway in the graceful old Houhai neighborhood, Mr. Zhao, 33, stopped beside a new government AIDS poster. He had not noticed the poster, or AIDS, before.

"I've never heard of it," he said. "I'm from Henan Province. We don't have it in Henan." Told that Henan is an epicenter of AIDS, with huge numbers of cases and deaths, Mr. Zhao shook his head. "There is nothing like that," he said. "It would have been on television if people had died of AIDS." This week, in a flurry of publicity coinciding with World AIDS Day, AIDS is finally all over television in China. New public service announcements promote awareness and even recommend condom use.

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The government has been urged to develop "maintenance treatment" medications for drug addicts, who are responsible for 40 per cent of street robberies in Guangzhou, reports New Express News.

Many countries and regions use medications such as methadone, LAAM and naltrexone to treat opiate addiction.

Though the medications have been criticized as "heroin substitutes" that only alleviate the symptoms of drug addiction, Guangzhou should consider similar treatment programmes if only for the purpose of improving social order, said Zheng Guoqiang, deputy director of the Standing Committee of the Municipal People's Congress.

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Women's anti-drug task forces have been active in Yingjiang County since 2002, during which time 1,449 of the county's 4,254 registered addicts have attended rehabilitation sessions organized by the groups. To date, 536 abusers have completely kicked the habit.

Nonetheless, the whole province of Yunnan, which shares a 2,184-kilometre border with Myanmar, is constantly confronted with the spread of narcotics. In 2001, provincial law enforcement authorities confiscated 8,731 kilograms of drugs, more than 70 per cent of all drugs seized in China that year.

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No one was sure whether the plan would work. But the 37 women from Southwest China's Yunnan Province, whose husbands had all succumbed to the lure of drugs, were determined. They had nothing to lose, and they wanted to turn the tables.

Erkun Village sits on a hillside about 70 kilometres from the China-Myanmar border in western Yunnan's Yingjiang County. All 298 of its residents occupying 63 households are of the Jinpo ethnic minority, known as Kachin in Myanmar. They enjoyed relatively peaceful, happy lives up until the 1980s, when the drug trade active in the adjacent notorious Golden Triangle made its way across the border as China opened up.

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BEIJING - Twenty-six convicted criminals were collectively sentenced to death in China's southern city of Guangzhou as part of a government effort to clear a back-log of cases awaiting verdict, state press reported on Sunday.

The 26 criminals were mostly convicted of "drug trafficking and other heinous crimes", and were sentenced to death on Saturday, the China News Service reported.

The collective death sentence was delivered under heavy security at the Guangzhou municipal court with some 150 armed police and security guards maintaining order, the report said.

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At the Beijing Drug Abuse Control Centre, 21-year-old Xiao Lan from Liaoning Province fidgets as painful memories of her past revisit her time and again, always leaving her with the single realization: It all began with ignorance.

She remembers a winter afternoon in 1986 in her home town of Benxi City when a kindergarten classmate asked her on the playground, "Would you dare to put your tongue against the metal rail on the slide?"

Without hesitation, Xiao Lan, then four, stuck out her tongue and did as she was challenged. When she tried to move away after a few seconds, she felt a sharp pain. In the bitterly cold air, her tongue had frozen firmly to the rail.

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Narcotics control police in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province teamed up with Russian authorities to crack down on a cross-border drug-trafficking ring and arrested two Russian suspects.

On April 28, local police in the city of Suifenhe seized two Russian suspects who were processing marijuana, and authorities in turn confiscated 1.6 kilograms of drugs, 20 kilograms of marijuana leaves and some processing equipment at the site, said Cui Cunde, head of the Heilongjiang Public Security Department's anti-drug brigade.

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Shanghai's Anti-drug Committee has announced that the number of drug users in the city greatly increased over the past few years, to reach 15,643 last year, some 3,767 more than in 2001.

According to Labour Daily, officials said that although most drug users were jobless, more young white-collar workers were also falling victim to drug abuse.

In 1999, 33 of the drug users at the Shanghai Mandatory Rehabilitation Institute had attended college, accounting for just 0.5 per cent of the addicts residing there. However, the number rose to 65 in 2002.

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FIRST ELEMENTARY SCHOOL FOR KIDS OF DRUG ADDICTS IN SINO-MYANMAR BORDER

An elementary school for the kids of drug addicts has been set up on the Sino-Myanmar border belt, a major drug trafficking center.

Myanmar-China Campus School Against Drugs with an area of 1,000 square meters, is located at the No. 4 Special Zone in the east of Shan State, Myanmar.

The school contains 173-sq-m classrooms equipped with 40 sets of desks as well as a seven-cubic-meter tank used to store clean drinking water.

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