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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LIKE in Malaysia, the authorities in Hong Kong are getting worried over a trend by partygoers and young people to experiment with mind-bending substances and so-called designer drugs.

Amid reports of some notable figures caught popping various types of psychotropic pills at rave parties and other occasions, anti-narcotics authorities have decided to get the community involved in the fight against drug abuse and go where the action is.

Among the highlighted cases is the trial of the 33-year-old son of a tycoon said to have possessed cocaine, Viagra and other drugs at a rave party. Hearing has been adjourned to January next year.

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Considerable luck would still be needed for Hong Kong to be struck from an American global "hit list" of major illegal drug trafficking and money laundering centres, a senior SAR official warned yesterday.

Commissioner for Narcotics Clarie Lo Ku Ka-lee said she had been given assurances from US officials that Hong Kong would be dealt with fairly and squarely but no guarantees that it would be pulled from the list.

"I am confident there is now a greater understanding of all our efforts in Washington and I think they are impressed at everything we are doing," Ms Lo said after a week-long trip to the US capital. "We are still going to need some luck I think . . . this is an issue we will have to keep working on."

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The Hong Kong government has granted around 500,000 HK dollars (US$64,100) to finance 19 district anti-drug preventive education and publicity projects under the Community Against Drugs Scheme (CADS) in the year 2000/ 2001, according to a government press release Monday.

Funded by the Action Committee Against Narcotics (ACAN) of Hong Kong, the objective of the CADS is to encourage non-profit-making organizations, such as voluntary bodies and schools, to launch preventive education and publicity projects to further the anti-drug cause.

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A taskforce is to tighten controls on the tranquilliser ketamine amid growing abuse and fears it is being used in "date rapes".

Since last year when the first case of ketamine abuse was reported, there have been 21 reported cases. The authorities handled 40 cases involving possession of 2.08 kilos of the substance.

Originally used as animal tranquilliser, ketamine can result in hallucinations and lead users to cause unwitting injury to themselves.

Ketamine can cause people to lose control, and officials fear it may have been used in attacks on women. Seizures of ketamine by police early this year revealed the drug had gained popularity as a party drug.

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Hong Kong may be taken off the "hit list", compiled by the United States, of pariah territories perceived to be lax in prosecuting the international war on the drugs trade.

We've been given a clean bill of health. That's nice.

It is also a nice bit of effrontery on behalf of the country which is the world's leading consumer and importer of cocaine, heroin and other narcotics. If any nation deserves to be on an international list of censure for creating a demand for illegal drugs, it is the US.

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The director of American drug policy, Barry McCaffrey, is due in Beijing on Saturday to begin a three-nation Asian tour to survey treatment programmes and discuss anti-trafficking cooperation, the US embassy said.

In the mainland, which had 680,000 registered drug addicts last year, the US anti-drug czar would meet his counterparts in Beijing and look at drug treatment and prevention programmes in Kunming, near the drug-infested border with Burma, it said.

Mr McCaffrey - accompanied by a delegation including Randy Beers, the Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and US drug research experts and Coast Guard officials - would also visit Hong Kong, Vietnam and Thailand, it said.

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Teenagers as young as 14 and 15 have admitted crossing the border at weekends for drugs and sex at rave parties, social workers said yesterday. Three junior secondary school boys, aged 14 and 15, were among 18 young people interviewed by the Hong Kong Council of Social Services who had been to the mainland in the past year to take drugs.

Details of the interviews come amid growing concern about the trend in youngsters crossing the border to Shenzhen. Last year, 2,600 Ecstasy tablets were confiscated from mostly young travellers returning from Shenzhen.

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Social workers were initially puzzled to notice a decline in activity in the seedy places where drug trading takes place in the SAR. They soon discovered why. Addicts and social users were crossing to Shenzhen, where designer drugs are easier to get, a little cheaper and a lot stronger. In addition, the cross-border travellers believe drug busts are rarer and those who get caught can pay their way out of trouble. According to drug workers, the idea that mainland officials can be bribed to look the other way is largely a myth. For the rest of the story, the facts speak for themselves.

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Police are looking into a claim a teenage prisoner was assaulted after he refused to disclose whether his cell mates were taking drugs. Chan Chi-lung, 18, said an officer beat him, kicked him for 10 minutes and then forced him to crouch and sat on his back.

Chan, a secondary four dropout and drug user, said the assault took place in Pik Uk Prison, Sai Kung, where he was on remand pending sentencing after pleading guilty to stealing methadone from a Tuen Mun government clinic.

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A housewife is trying to prevent her family of six being evicted after her dying husband was convicted of possessing opium, which he used to ease the pain of cancer. Thai Muoi yesterday filed a judicial review application seeking to quash the Housing Authority decision made in April which she described as unlawful.

She claimed it was wrong for the authority to terminate the tenancy agreement because she did not know her husband, Ho Lam, kept opium in their Choi Hung flat.

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HONG KONG, Jan 9 (Reuters) - Hong Kong Customs officials said they had uncovered a syndicate trafficking drugs to Taipei with the arrest of a member of a tour group with 2.8 kg (6lb 3 oz) of heroin strapped to his body.

Friday's arrest followed the January 5 detention of two men travelling to Taipei with 6.1 kg of heroin strapped in bags around their bodies, the Customs Drug Investigation Bureau said in a statement.

Last week, Hong Kong and Japanese police seized 100 kg (220 lb) of methamphatamine, or "ice" abaord an ocean-going vessel in Japan. Nineteen people were arrested.

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HONG KONG, Jan 6 (Reuters) - Hong Kong authorities said on Wednesday they had seized HK$18.1 million ($2.39 million) worth of heroin and arrested six people in two incidents this week.

Police said they believed they had smashed a drug syndicate on Wednesday with the seizure of HK$12 million worth of heroin and the arrest of four men.

The suspects, aged between 40 and 45, were arrested for drug trafficking after police found 14 kg (30 lb 15 oz) of heroin in a suitcase carried by one of them, a police statement said.

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HONG KONG, (Reuters) - Police seized about HK$5 million ($645,486) worth of the drugs "ice" and heroin and arrested a man and a woman in a drug bust in Hong Kong's busy tourist district, police said on Sunday.

Police said in a statement that they seized the drugs and arrested a 20- year-old man in a Saturday ambush on busy Nathan Road in the Tsim Sha Tsui tourist area of Kowloon. A 20-year old woman turned herself in later on Saturday.

The operation is believed to have smashed a drug-trafficking operation, the statement said.

The haul comprised about nine kilograms of "ice", the street name for the drug methamphetamine, and 730 grams of heroin.



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[Photo caption: Health benefit: the hemp products are advertised at a store.]

A cosmetics chain admitted yesterday it was selling products containing hemp, a type of cannabis.

But the Body Shop said the level of Cannabis sativa (hemp) seeds was so low it would be hard to detect and would not harm people.

A spokesman for the Security Bureau's narcotics division said it had sent samples to the Government Laboratory for tests.

"At this stage, we are not sure if they really contain cannabis or tetrahydro-cannabinol. THC is a type of psychotropical substance and could affect nerves. It is a controlled drug in Hong Kong," a division spokesman said.

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Hong Kong police raided six homes in connection with Australia's largest drug bust yesterday as a freighter used to import the 400kilograms of heroin was searched in Sydney.

Two people questioned in the Chinese territory were wives of Hong Kong nationals arrested on Wednesday as a boat took the high-grade heroin from the freighter Uniana to an isolated beach near Port Macquarie.

Hong Kong Narcotics Bureau officers conducted simultaneous raids across the former British colony, seizing documents relating to the drug-smuggling operation, a Hong Kong police spokesman said.

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Sentences for offences involving the drug Ecstasy were slashed yesterday after the Court of Appeal ruled it was not addictive, toxic or a serious threat to society.

Traffickers caught with less than 25 grams of the drug could walk away without spending a day in prison.

The new guidelines are a radical departure from the approach taken in Hong Kong's early Ecstasy cases.

Trafficker Lee Tak-kwan, 38, became the first to benefit from the changes yesterday. He broke into a broad smile as the court slashed his 12-year jail term by seven years.

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The rave drug Ecstasy is not particularly unhealthy and should never have been put in the same class as heroin, Court of Appeal judges said yesterday.

"Generally speaking, it is not causing an acute health problem," Mr Justice Noel Power said.

"It's becoming a fashionable drug for young people to take. It is not a lethal substance."

His comments came at a landmark hearing that will set sentencing guidelines for Ecstasy offences.

Defence barrister Wong Po-wing is asking the Court of Appeal to put Ecstasy on a par with opium - just above cannabis. His client, Lee Tak-kwan, was sentenced to 12 years in prison last March when Mr Justice Michael Stuart-Moore concluded the drug should be treated the same way as heroin.

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Three men and a woman have admitted illegally transferring more than $10 million out of Australia, the proceeds of a multimilliondollar heroin importing business.

The four pleaded guilty in the Downing Centre District Court yesterday to importing more than 17 kilograms of heroin in sauna equipment and to moneylaundering.

The court heard the drug ring was uncovered in November 1995, when a National Crime Authority (NCA) team searched the Undercliffe home of Vi Lam, 43, and his wife, Jing Min Tan, 35.

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But William Tang, who was criticized by antidrug workers for promoting socalled ``heroin chic,'' called the syringes merely ``witty accessories'' that depicted the real Hong Kong.

``I was not promoting it (drugs), I was not glamourizing it. It's a fact, it happens in our society. It's the landscape of Hong Kong,'' Tang told Reuters.

``If you look closely, you see the bodies of the models are deformed, so I am making the statement that this is a deformed society,'' he said, referring to how the models had huge lumps protruding from under their clothes.

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