China is tough on drugs. Many traffickers are among the thousands of people executed annually
20 years ago, when he was still a teenager, Lin Guangpeng tried heroin that his friends had brought to a party near his home in the south-western province of Yunnan. Soon addicted, Mr Lin—not his real name—spent many of the subsequent years behind bars, including several long stretches in detention centres for drug users. He says wardens in these “compulsory isolation detoxification” facilities put him to work in prison factories. Such places are meant to heal your body, he says .
Last month President Donald Trump said he had asked his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, whether China had a drug problem. He said Mr Xi denied it. “We give death penalty to people who sell drugs. End of problem,” Mr Trump quoted Mr Xi as saying, as if in stilted English. Yet China clearly does have a problem. The number of registered drug users has been drifting steadily upwards. In 1991 there were 150,000 such people. By 2017 there were 2.5m.
Worried by these trends, the authorities have been experimenting with less punitive methods of controlling the demand side. The management of China’s compulsory detoxification centres has mostly passed from the police to the judiciary. The latter is slightly more interested in providing inmates with appropriate medical help, says one Chinese expert.
But change is slow. People who go to methadone clinics or private treatment centres risk being pounced on by police trying to meet arrest quotas. A law passed in 2008 promised more “community-based” rehabilitation programmes. But there are still few of them and they are not very effective. There is still no convincing sign that the government is trying to create an alternative to detention.
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