SHANGHAI -- China marked International Day Against Drug Abuse by executing 64 people accused of drug crimes, officials and state media said Wednesday. Other nations staged anti-drug rallies and burned piles of confiscated narcotics.

Many of the Chinese executions came immediately after public rallies at which thousands watched as judges condemned the accused and authorities burned piles of seized heroin, Ecstasy and other drugs.

China usually marks the day with a wave of publicized executions, underscoring authorities' belief that harsh punishments are an effective weapon against drugs. United Nations officials have said they do not condone the practice. Meanwhile, in Myanmar, the military government torched a pile of seized drugs and insisted that it was committed to fighting narcotics, despite international accusations that the junta profits from the drug trade. At a ceremony in Yangon, the capital, authorities set ablaze more than 3 tons of opium, 530 pounds of heroin and nearly 35 million stimulant tablets.

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At least 27 convicted drug criminals were executed in China to mark Wednesday's international anti-drug day, while scores of others were sentenced to death or to prison terms, state press reports said.

Fourteen people were sentenced to death in China's southwestern Sichuan province on Tuesday, with nine of them immediately taken to the execution grounds and shot, the China News Service reported.

The sentencing took place at a rally at the Shuangliu county sports ground in the provincial capital of Chengdu, where local authorities also incinerated 40 kilograms of drugs, it said.

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BEIJING - China said Monday that Southeast Asia faced a grim battle with increasingly organized drug rings in the notorious heroin hotbed known as the Golden Triangle and called for tougher joint efforts to stem the tide.

The region's drug battle also must focus equal attention on amphetamine types like "ice" and "ecstasy," increasingly mixed in clandestine Chinese laboratories, senior drug official Wang Gang told counterparts from five Southeast Asian neighbors and the United Nations (news - web sites) at the start of a three-day meeting.

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Successful, Young, Professional - The Profile Hardly Fits Drug Abusers - But It Applies To More And More Of Them In China's Night Spots

BEIJING -- High-income Chinese professionals are cashing in on new leisure drugs and as a result they have become the focus of an anti-drug campaign.

Since February, police have infiltrated more than 21,000 discos, bars and karaoke lounges and made spot checks to flush out young drug users.

Up to 882 night spots have been warned or closed down, according to Chinese public security authorities.

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BEIJING -- A Beijing restaurant-owner was sentenced to 18 months in prison for sprinkling ground opium poppy over a spicy fish dish in an effort to ensure that diners returned, a newspaper reported.

Beijing's Haidian District People's Court on April 23 convicted Bi Jingxiang of "tricking others into using drugs" and also ordered him to pay a $365 fine, the Workers Daily said in its Saturday edition.

Bi claimed ground opium poppy was frequently used in his hometown of Chongqing to prevent dysentery among those partaking of the region's spicy cuisine.

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HIGH in the hills of a remote part of southern China, the villagers claim to have discovered the secret of long life: rice wine, drunk more or less all day long; snake wine; and a soup made from the oily seeds of the cannabis plant.

Bama county is so cut off by the hills that surround it that the motor car has yet to penetrate. It has a population of just over 300,000, yet it has 73 centenarians, one of the highest ratios in the world.

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SEATTLE -- By genetically fingerprinting the AIDS and hepatitis C viruses, researchers from China and New York have shown that the world's most-populous nation is suffering from distinct epidemics of these blood-borne microbes. Separately, another team of researchers showed just how fast HIV mutates, finding that it evolves far more swiftly than the influenza virus.

The Yunnan province in the southwest region of China abuts the Golden Triangle, a major source of heroin . Here, the HIV and hepatitis C epidemics are driven by injection drug users, who share infected needles. In this region, a strain of HIV, called subtype C, extends north from Yunnan along the old Silk Road, which is now used by drug couriers. Similarly, the hepatitis C virus, called HCV, is dominated in this same region by a strain called subtype 3.

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Increasing drug use in Asia is accelerating the spread of HIV-AIDS along drug trafficking routes from the so-called Golden Triangle to nations like Indonesia and governments are doing too little to combat it, a report says.

The report on 22 Asian countries said Asian governments were working against the sexual transmission of HIV but they were not doing enough to prevent the virus spreading among injecting drug users.

"Without such action, Asia will continue to be home to what threatens to be amongst the worst regional AIDS epidemics on Earth," said the report by The Centre For Harm Reduction, one of Asia's foremost health and medical research bodies.

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BEIJING -- Twelve people from Hong Kong have been detained after China's biggest heroin seizure on record, police said Tuesday, highlighting the growing role of Hong Kong traffickers in the Chinese drug trade.

The Hong Kong suspects were among 21 picked up after police seized nearly 1,500 pounds of heroin in November in the southwestern province of Yunnan, said Sun Dahong, deputy director of the provincial police.

The heroin was found in a joint raid by Chinese and Myanmar police, the biggest seizure since a deal for cooperation against drug trafficking was signed in August by China and Laos, Thailand and Myanmar -- the three countries that make up the heroin-producing "Golden Triangle."

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MANILA, Philippines -- Zeng Jiaxuan sold fish balls in the shadow of Spanish mission churches when he first arrived here from his native China. Yet within a year he was hawking something far more lucrative - -- methamphetamines -- and was on his way to becoming one of the biggest drug barons in his adoptive country.

His rise, and eventual disappearance, provides a window onto what is being described as the Opium Wars in reverse. Instead of 19th-century British trading houses pushing opium on the Chinese, China's massive production might is shoveling an addictive stimulant known as "ice" into markets from Seoul to Sydney, throwing police forces and governments off balance.

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Philippine and Chinese law enforcers have agreed to strengthen bilateral cooperation to fight drug trafficking, kidnapping and other transnational crimes, an official said yesterday.

Officials from the National Bureau of Investigation and Chinaa TMs Ministry of Public Security and Criminal Investigation Department met in Beijing earlier this month to follow up an agreement between Chinese President Jiang Zemin and President Arroyo.

The agreement "aims to stop drug trafficking, kidnapping and transnational crimes," said NBI Director Reynaldo Wycoco.

The Philippines and China signed a mutual extradition treaty during Mrs. Arroyoa TMs trip to China last October. Philippine authorities hope this will deter Chinese drug traffickers and organized crime groups operating in the Philippines.

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CCTV, China's central television, is broadcasting a high-powered TV documentary warning people about drugs, particularly the fast spreading amphetamine-type stimulants "ice" and "Ecstasy", also known as the "head-shaking" pill.

The addicts are seen rocking forwards and shaking their heads violently in darkness. They rock and shake on and on, unable to control themselves, unaware that the pills that make them move in this way are steadily taking away their health, and their life.

The production of "New Types of Narcotics: Disaster of this Century" was commissioned by China's National Narcotics Control Commission (NNCC), which expects it to play an important educational role in the coming nation-wide anti-drug campaign mainly dealing with amphetamine- type stimulants.

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In the early 19th century, it was the "black mud" that brought China out of Celestial isolation and into the realm of geopolitics. The Opium Wars marked the start of China's subjugation by Western (and later Eastern) imperialists.

Opium brought China and many Chinese to their knees.

The almost total eradication of its use was one of communist China's proudest achievements. But there has been a vengeful revival of illicit drug use over the past 20 years.

This week, China admitted it was heading steadily towards having 1 million registered drug users as it struggled against a rising flood of illegal narcotics. How many unregistered users there are is anyone's guess.

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KUNMING, China -- Li Bai's body is on the front line of the battle to prevent an explosion of AIDS in China. For the last seven years, the baby-faced 23-year-old with platform sneakers and blond-streaked hair has been using drugs -- a dangerous hobby in a city where an estimated 40 percent of intravenous drug users are now infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

She has long known about AIDS, at least in a general sense. But, she confesses, she has sometimes shared needles when shooting up. She has also sold sex on the street, she admits, and condoms have not always been a priority. Such behaviors put her at extraordinary risk of acquiring H.I.V. and of spreading it.

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BEIJING - The number of known drug addicts in China has topped 900,000, fueling crime and the spread of AIDS, state media said Monday.

More than 30 percent of robberies are committed by addicts to pay for drugs, the reports said. They said two-thirds of new AIDS cases are linked to sharing of dirty needles by heroin users.

The reports add to new openness about AIDS and drug abuse in China after years of official denial that neither was a serious problem.

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The Intermediate Court of Shenzhen in South China's Guangdong Province on Tuesday sentenced to death a Hong Kong resident for making and selling huge quantities of the drug "ice."

Zhuang Chucheng, 40, born in Chaoyang City of Guangdong and now a Hong Kong resident, was also deprived of his political rights for life and all of his personal property was confiscated.

Zhuang and Chen Wenyi, who is still at large, planned to manufacture methamphetamine hydrochloride, known as "ice," in 1995. They recruited Lin Qitong and Li Xuelan, both engineers at a pharmaceutical factory in Nanning, capital of southwest China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, to make "ice" in a laboratory using chemical synthesis.

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BEIJING (AP) -- The heroin trail snakes up from China's borders -- and into its towns and cities and through the veins of its addicts. But it stops at the Beijing Police Compulsory Drug Detoxification Center.

Here, behind brick walls emblazoned with slogans such as "Love Life," the state makes inmates in striped blue-and-white pajamas say no to drugs.

Police took foreign reporters on a brief and controlled tour of the center recently -- a sign that China is beginning to treat its growing drug problem with increasing openness rather than as an embarrassment best kept hidden.

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A court in south China has sentenced a Hong Kong drug lord and his four associates to death following what is believed to be the world's largest haul of "ice," local reports said.

The Intermediate Court of Shenzhen, adjoining Hong Kong, convicted Chong Cho-shing (Zhuang Chucheng), 40, the leader of a narcotics ring, and four other men, of making and selling more than 31 tonnes of methamphetamine hydrochloride, popularly known as "ice.

The four others were aged between 40 and 48.

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In Butuo, A Town Of 10,000, As Many As 20 Die Each Year From Overdoses

BUTUO, China -- By day, Butuo is an ethnic backwater, where women in long, embroidered blue skirts tote baskets filled with chunks of pork, and men in full-length capes carry bundles of twigs, fuel for indoor fire pits.

It is a place populated by China's large but impoverished Yi ethnic minority, where donkey carts wind past simple red mud houses dressed for winter, hanging heavy with chains of red pepper and yellow corn.

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