China’s Drug Problem and Looming HIV Epidemic

Abstract

Since Deng Xiaoping opened Chinas economy in 1979 many Chinese cities have developed a frenetic energy the kind of 24-hour hubbub that comes with nonstop work and play. In Hangzhou consumer electronics companies feeding Chinas massive telephone and computer markets work through the night. In Shanghai wealthy merchants along Nanjing Road and other swank streets who have made the city Chinas retail center haggle with customers incessantly the sounds of their jousting filtering up into the apartments above. But in Kunming capital of southwest Chinas Yunnan province and a city that has attracted little foreign investment law enforcement officials believe the constant energy late-model sedans gaudy jewelry and other signs of prosperity often come from another less licit industry: narcotics. As China has developed close links with Southeast Asia a change that has coincided with Beijings loosening of social controls the Peoples Republic has experienced an explosion of drug trafficking and abuse much of it concentrated in Yunnan and several large coastal cities. Though Chinas current drug habit does not yet compare to the countrys nineteenth-century addiction today use of heroin methamphetamines and other drugs is skyrocketing and Chinese gangs have aggressively entered the narcotics trade in Asia and the West. Just as important this narcotics habit is pushing China toward an HIV catastrope as Chinese injectable drug users spread the deadly virus. Ultimately unless Beijing changes its policies regarding narcotics and HIV drug abuse could contribute to the destruction of Chinas social fabric a development that could cost Chinas leader Jiang Zemin and his cohort their jobs--or their heads--but would not necessarily lead to a democratic Middle Kingdom. (excerpt)