Pubdate: Sun, 10 Jan 2010
Source: Scotland On Sunday (UK)
Copyright: 2010 The Scotsman Publications Ltd.
Contact: http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/contactus.aspx
Website: http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/405
Author: Andrew Jacobs
Note: author in Beijing
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/area/China

CHINESE ENSLAVE ADDICTS IN 'REHAB CENTRES'

Fu Lixin, emotionally exhausted from caring for her sick mother, needed a
little pick-me-up. A friend offered her a "special cigarette" -- one laced
with methamphetamine -- and she happily inhaled.

The next day, three policemen showed up at her door. "They asked me to
urinate in a cup," Fu said. "My friend had been arrested and turned me in.
It was a drug test. I failed on the spot."

Although she said it was her first time smoking the drug,

Fu, 41, was sent to one of China's compulsory drug rehabilitation centres.
The minimum stay is two years, and life is an unremitting gauntlet of
physical abuse and forced labour without any drug treatment, according to
former inmates and substance abuse professionals. "It was a hell I'm still
trying to recover from," she said.

According to the United Nations, up to half a million Chinese citizens are
held at these centres at any given time. Detentions are meted out by the
police without trial.

Now international human rights activists are stepping up opposition to the
centres.

Created in 2008 as part of a reform effort to grapple with the country's
growing narcotics problem, the centres have become de facto penal colonies
where inmates are sent to factories and farms, fed substandard food and
denied basic medical care, lawyers and drugs, experts have claimed.

"They call them detoxification centres, but everyone knows that detox
takes a few days, not two years," said Joseph Amon, an epidemiologist with
Human Rights Watch in New York. "The basic concept is inhumane and
flawed."

Last week Human Rights Watch issued a report on the drug rehabilitation
system that replaced the Communist Party's previous approach of sending
addicts to labour camps, where they would toil alongside thieves,
prostitutes and political dissidents.

The report, Where Darkness Knows No Limits, calls on the government to
immediately shut the centres. Under the Anti-Drug Law of 2008, drug
offenders were to be sent to professionally staffed detox facilities and
then released to community-based rehabilitation centres for up to four
years of therapeutic follow-up.

But substance abuse experts claim the legislation has simply given the old
system a new name. What is worse, they say, it expands the six-month
compulsory detentions into two-year periods the authorities can extend by
five years.

Wang Xiaoguang, vice-director of Daytop, a US-affiliated drug-treatment
residence in Yunnan Province, said the government detox centres were
little more than business ventures run by the police. Detainees, he said,
spend their days working at chicken farms or shoe factories which have
contracts with the local police. Drug treatment and counselling are almost
nonexistent.

"I don't think this is the ideal situation for people trying to recover
from addiction," Wang said. In its report, Human Rights Watch, which
largely focused on Yunnan, says the abuses at some of the province's 114
detention centres are even more troubling. Those with serious illnesses,
including TB and Aids, are often denied medical treatment. Many inmates
reported beatings, some fatal.

Han Wei, 38, a recovering heroin addict released from a Beijing detention
centre in October, said the guards would use electric prods.

Meals consisted of steamed buns and, occasionally, cabbage-based swill.
Showers were allowed once a month. And the remedy for heroin withdrawal
symptoms was a pail of cold water in the face. "They didn't give me a
single pill or a bit of counselling," Han said.

Despite the deprivations, Han, a former nightclub owner, said his two-year
sentence persuaded him to kick a habit he began in 1998. "I'm never going
back," he said.

Zhang Wenjun, who runs Guiding Star, an organisation that helps recovering
addicts, said such determination was most often fleeting. At least 98 per
cent of those who leave the drug detention system relapse within a few
years, he said.

Zhang's own heroin addiction has landed him in detox centres and labour
camps six times since the mid-1990s. "What the government doesn't realise
is this is a disease that needs to be treated, not punished," said Zhang,
42.

In some ways, he said, the stigma of addiction is as crippling as the lure
of the next fix. Those arrested are branded addicts on their national
identification cards, which makes applying for jobs and benefits futile.
And because the local police are automatically notified when former
offenders check into hotels, travelling often involves impromptu urine
tests and the possibility of humiliation in front of colleagues. "In
China, to be a drug addict is to be an enemy of the government," Zhang
said.

However, he and other drug treatment workers are quick to acknowledge the
progress that China has made in recent years. There are now eight
methadone clinics in Beijing, serving 2,000 people, and more than 1,000
needle-exchange programmes have opened across the country since 2004.

Yu Jingtao, whose organisation, Beijing Harm Reduction Group, distributes
30,000 clean needles a month, said the government was slowly moving
towards the drug treatment model common in much of the developed world.
"We're just caught in a transition period," said Yu, himself a recovering
addict. "Transition periods are never very pretty."
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MAP posted-by: Doug