From: mdo@socrates.umd.edu ("Mike T. Do")
Subject: [NEWS] Vietnam Sees Dramatic Rise in Drug Abuse
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Date: 23 Nov 92 22:56:28 GMT

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VIETNAM SEES DRAMATIC RISE IN DRUG ABUSE
From Washington Post (11/22/93)
Treatment Center Offer Addicts Rudimentary Aid
By William Branigin
Washington Post Foreign Service

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam - Newly arrived addicts at a drug rehabilitation
center were lining up for medical checkups when a scream rang out from a
building across the courtyard.
    A wailing man, stripped to the waist, lunged over the second-floor
balcony, only to be restrained and hauled back by fellow addicts after
dangling momentarily.  Like many others before him, officials later said, he
was suffering the agony of withdrawal from daily injections of a highly
addictive liquid form of opium, the drug used to make heroin.
    "I cannot explain why I keep using it," said Tran Huu Duc, a jobless 34-
year-old addict, after watching the scene as he waited for his checkup on his
10th return to the center since 1976.  "Drugs are like a ghost.  They can
attack anybody."
    Seventeen years after reunification, Vietnam has a major drug problem,
and not just in this former of South Vietnamese capital previously known as
Saigon.
    In Hanoi, the seat of the Communist government whose disciplined forces
defeated the U.S.-backed Saigon administration, drug addiction also has risen
dramatically in the last couple of years, officials concede.
    At the four-year-old Center for the Prevention of drug Misuse just south
of Hanoi, addicts who have been hauled in by police are locked in jail-like
cells for a month before being allowed to join others who have come to the
center voluntarily.  Addicts in interviewed there represented a cross section
of Vietnamese society:  poor farmers from hamlets near the capital, a former
Interior Ministry counterintelligence officer and the indolent son of a
nouveau riche family.
    Facilities at the centers are Spartan and treatments rudimentary.  The
cures include massages, cold baths, acupuncture and experimental Vietnamese
herbal medicine whose ingredients are a closely held secret.
    At the Drug Abuse Tackling and Prevention Center on the outskirts of Ho
Chi Minh City, the treatment also encompasses what officials describe as
"psychological reeducation" as well as 20 months of "labor education" in
workshops at the center or farms in "new economic zones."
    Formerly, the government was loath to talk about drug abuse except as a
legacy of the Saigon regime and the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
Now, however, officials are lifting the veil from what they acknowledge are
home-grown social evils edge are home-grown social evils that have
accompanied an economic "renovation" policy, know as doi moi, that has
instituted free-market reforms.
    The new candor is the result of a parallel policy called coi moi, or
"openness," that has also shed light on such other widespread problems as
corruption, smuggling and prostitution.
    According to Nghiem Xuan Tue, a top official in Hanoi's Ministry of Labor,
Invalids and Social Affairs, there are at least 120,000 drug addicts in
Vietnam, which has a population of 68.5 million.  The vast majority of the
addicts are hooked on opium that comes from the country's mountainous
northern provinces bordering China, and many of them are ethnic minorities
for whom opium-smoking is traditional.
    Addiction in urban areas has risen alarming.  Hanoi, which has 3.1
million inhabitants, has about 8,000 addicts, Tue said, plus about 4,000
occasional users.  About 7 percent of the total are women, and 80 percent of
those women are prostitutes, he said.
    "These are side effects of the market economy, but that does not mean we
will discontinue it," Tue said.  "We will continue to open widely our doors,
but we have to find more effective measures to restrain this phenomenon."
    A looming potential problem is AIDS.  The use of syringes to inject a
brown liquid form of opium has increased sharply in the las few years
compared with the more traditional smoking.  More than half the country's
addicts now inject the drug intravenously, and many share needles, officials
say.
    So far, few casees of the virus that causes AIDS have been reported, but
testing has been sporadic.  More immediate worries for authorities in Hanoi
have been increases in crime, including robbery and murder, as well as
gambling, smuggling, and family breakups in areas where drugs are used.
    "Previously there were almost no drug addicts in Hanoi," Tue said.  "But
in the last two years, 40 percent of criminal cases have been closely linked
to addiction."
    The director of the rehabilitation center near Hanoi, Truong Quang To,
said 517 addicts have been treated since the facility opened in 1988, but
about 35 percent were found to have resumed using drugs after their release.
    "I really want to be cured completely so I can return home and continue
farming," said Nguyen Van Dung, a lean 30-year-old with a sallow face.  "I
don't know how long I have to spend here to cure my illness."  He was
arrested Nov. 4 with a friend, Nguyen Van Tien, 26, while smoking in an opium
den in a farming village near Hanoi.  They shared a cell with Le Van Son, 28,
a vendor from the village who was arrested separately.  On the wall next to
their cell, an AIDS information poster warned against injecting drugs and
having "sex with many different people."
    In a part of the center where patients are not confined, Nguyen Mau Dan,
39, said he had been an addict for 17 years since being assigned to Ho Chi
Minh City as an Interior Ministry counterintelligence agent.  He said his
work brought him into contact with drug users, and he soon became an addict
himself, first smoking and later injecting opium.
    Hoang Le Huy, 24, said he became an addict in Hanoi five years ago when he
"imitated" some friends.  "My family is ver rich," he said.  "I spent a lot
of money on drinks, cigarettes and parties, but these things became boring."
He said he began shooting up three years ago because "smoking [opium] takes a
lot of time."
    Huy showed marks in the crook of his left arm where he injected the drug.
He said his habit cost him up to 150,000 dong (about $15) a day a pittance by
Western standards but the equivalent here of a teacher's monthly salary.
    In Ho Chi Minh jCJity, more than 30,000 addicts have passed through the
drug rehabilitation center since it opened 17 years ago in the compound of a
Roman Catholic church that was taken over by the government.  According to
Phan Nguyen Binh, the center's director, a survey indicated that at least
half the patients-and possibly up to 75 percent-have slid back into drug use
after they left.  He said the city of 4.5 million people now has at least
20,000 addicts and another 10,000 users.  About 90 percent the addicts
inject, he said.
    The center here appeared to be much more ideological than the one in
Hanoi, although official insisted that the "reeducation" of the addicts was
not political.  Displays of handicrafts made by addicts included a wooden
bas-relief of Lenin and a large bust of Ho Chi Minh


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