A Ho Chi Minh City leader has asked relevant forces to step up anti-drug screenings at Tan Son Nhat airport and crack down on hotspots due to an explosion in drug-related arrests and seizures. Le Thanh Hai, chief of the city's Party Unit, made the remark Saturday at a five-year review of the Politburo's decree on enhanced drug prevention and control. Phan Anh Minh, vice director of the HCMC police department, said the city arrested around 16,000 people for drug crimes in the past five years, up 20 percent from the previous five years. [continues 203 words]
Smokers, Quoting Dealers, Said Some of the Weed Comes into the Country Via the Northern Port in Haiphong, a City That Has a Reputation for the Import and Export of Illegal Goods. HANOI, Vietnam - For the young Vietnamese dope smokers rolling up outside a smart Hanoi cafe, local cannabis is just not good enough. As with their Adidas caps, iPhones and Sanskrit tattoos, so with their choice of bud: Only foreign will do. Potent marijuana grown in Canada and the United States is easy to buy in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, say regular smokers, and it sells for up to 10 times the price of locally grown weed. That's perhaps surprising given that marijuana is easy to cultivate regionally, and bringing drugs across continents is expensive and risky. [continues 746 words]
HANOI (AP) - For the young Vietnamese dope smokers rolling up outside a smart Hanoi cafe, local cannabis is just not good enough. As with their Adidas caps, iPhones and Sanskrit tattoos, so with their choice of bud: Only foreign will do. Potent marijuana grown indoors in Canada and the United States is easy to buy in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, say regular smokers, and sells for up to 10 times the price of locally grown weed. That's perhaps surprising, given that marijuana is easy to cultivate regionally, and bringing drugs across continents is expensive and risky. [continues 311 words]
HCM CITY - HCM City authorities hope to reduce the rate of people relapsing into illegal drug use, as part of efforts in the city's ongoing battle against drugs crime. The city's plan to fight illegal drug use by 2020 with a vision to 2030 was launched today by the HCM City People's Committee. Authorities aim to reduce the rate of relapse among former drug addicts from the current rate of 17 per cent to 10-15 per cent. [continues 705 words]
Nguyen Manh Chien said he began using heroin in 1999 and failed to quit despite two different stays at rehabilitation centers. The 41-year-old native of Hai Phong City's Le Chan Ward was using the drug four times a day, seven days a week, spending around VND200,000 each day before receiving methadone maintenance therapy (MMT) treatment as part of a pilot program that began in 2008 in Hai Phong and Ho Chi Minh cities. After two months of treatment, Chien said he was no longer attacked by heroin cravings, and he regained seven kilograms and his normal health. He is now leading a normal life with a job at an electronics repair service. [continues 584 words]
Marijuana is being grown secretly in Vietnam in cellars, an official said at a conference in the Central Highlands Lam Dong Province Friday. The plants are kept in underground rooms with the light on day and night, said Nguyen Van Du, deputy head of the Department of Cooperative Economy and Rural Development under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. Du said the cultivation of hemp plants has become complicated recently, adding that it's hard to recognize marijuana when it is planted together with other vegetables in the mountainous areas. [continues 90 words]
HCM CITY - The deployment of more sophisticated trading means and connivance of some local officials have made it more difficult for police to curb rising drug abuse and trade in HCM City, a senior police official has said. Colonel Phan Anh Minh, Deputy Director of HCM City Police, also said that the number of criminal cases relating to drugs in 2008 had increased by 36 per cent compared with 2007, mainly in the districts of 1, 2, 6, 11, Tan Binh, Tan Phu and Binh Chanh. [continues 230 words]
China And Vietnam Are Increasingly Used As Conduits, UN Drug Office Says Trucked in from the nearest commercial harbour, the containers marked GLDU 7367200 and WHLU 5086522 arrived in a bonded warehouse in the Vietnamese frontier town of Mong Cai, waiting to be taken to Guangxi province in China. That was when members of the Vietnamese C17 anti-drug squad struck this week, seizing nearly nine tonnes of cannabis resin, or hashish, the largest drug haul ever in Vietnam. The shipment - reportedly with a street value of $90-million (U.S.) - originated from Pakistan and was headed for Canada, according to its bill of lading. There was no immediate confirmation yesterday whether the drug was truly bound for a Canadian destination. [continues 398 words]
Thanh Hoa -- The ministries of Education and Training and Public Security, in co-ordination with the Thanh Hoa Provincial People's Committee, yesterday launched a campaign in honour of the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking today. The campaign is aimed at calling all people, including the 23 million students nationwide, to respond to the UN slogan "Do drugs control your life? Your Life, Your Community. No Place for Drugs." The slogan will be used for three years for a campaign focused on different aspects of drug control: drug abuse in 2007, drug cultivation and production in 2008 and illegal drug trafficking in 2009. [continues 332 words]
HA NOI -- Over 3,800 drug cases were brought to trial in Viet Nam in the first five months of this year during what officials call the biggest crackdown on drug smuggling and trafficking in recent years. The police's aggressive zero tolerance policy resulted in the arrest of 5,500 suspects and the confiscation of 300kg of heroin and opium along with 20,000 ecstasy pills. Police have said that they are increasingly targeting drug runners that utilise remote border crossings to smuggle contraband into the country. A ring that was disbanded in late May exemplified this approach. The group, police said, was working with criminal syndicates from overseas to transport heroin into the southwestern border province of Long An from the Golden Triangle via Cambodia. [continues 243 words]
HA NOI -- Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has asked ministries, offices and People's Committees in cities and provinces to launch a crackdown on drug crime. The five-month crackdown will last from May 29 to September 26, under the Prime Minister's order. Dung has granted authority to the Ministry of Public Security, in collaboration with the Ministry of National Defence, the Ministry of Finance and city and provincial people's committees, to direct the anti-drug campaign in an attempt to suppress drug crime in key areas like the borders and the coast. [continues 236 words]
Joshua Marston burst onto the film scene as a screenwriter and director with Maria Full of Grace, winner of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award, among others. Julie Ginsberg picked his brain while his film played at UNFPA's International Film Festival. Inner Sanctum: I saw that you completed a Master's Degree in political science before attending New York University film school. Would you say that you have political goals with your films? Yeah, there's no question that the work that I did in political science has informed the filmmaking that I'm interested in, and for me it's always been a question of finding some middle ground where I can be creative and also do something which has some relationship or bearing on the world that we live in. So I'm interested in telling stories, fictional stories that are personal but that are told in a context that has some larger social or political relevance. For example, the story of Maria Full of Grace is one girl's story, but it gives you a sense of the larger world of drug trafficking and immigration. [continues 1125 words]
"May I have a newspaper?" says a young man as he runs over and reaches through the iron fence, hoping to be lucky enough to get his hands on one of the newspapers that the young reporter is carrying. In minutes, the stack of newspapers is gone, much to the regret of the many men who arrived late. This is a daily fixture of life at the Hoa Binh Rehabilitation Centre, an inpatient drug treatment programme, where people from different cities and provinces all over North Viet Nam have voluntarily placed themselves in order to treat their addiction to drugs. [continues 995 words]
Vietnam will double its anti-drug police force in six southwestern provinces to curb narcotics trafficking from neighboring Cambodia into Vietnam, state-controlled media reported Saturday. The decision came at a meeting of law enforcement officials in Ho Chi Minh City on Friday, the Youth newspaper said. Speaking at the conference, deputy national police chief Lt. Gen. Nguyen Viet Thanh expressed concern that only 15 percent to 18 percent of the country's total drug cases were uncovered at the border areas, compared with the rate of 80 percent to 85 percent in other countries. [continues 144 words]
A DRUG trafficker was executed by firing squad in Vietnam as part of the government's unyielding crackdown on the narcotics trade, a court official said today. Trang A Co, 27, was put to death at dawn yesterday at an execution ground in the northern province of Bac Giang, the official from the provincial People's Court said. He was found guilty in November last year of trafficking more than 3kg of heroin from neighbouring Laos in the two-month period before his arrest in July 2002. [continues 56 words]
HANOI, Vietnam - Two Canadians were sentenced up to 16 years in prison for drug-dealing in Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnamese news media reported Tuesday. Randy James Sachs, 27, was sentenced to 16 years in prison and Nguyen Van Hai Sheena, 41, to 16 years at a one-day trial Monday, the Liberated Saigon newspaper said. The two were arrested in May 2003 while distributing 1,000 ecstasy tablets to dealers in Ho Chi Minh City night clubs, the newspaper said. Vietnamese media said Sachs and Hai were part of a ring that trafficked the pills from overseas to Ho Chi Minh City for distribution to dealers. [end]
HANOI - A Vietnamese woman has been sentenced to death for attempting to traffic heroin to Taiwan, a court official said on Tuesday. Nguyen Anh Minh, 36, was arrested on July 29 last year at Ho Chi Minh City's Tan Son Nhat airport while trying to board a flight to Taipei after customs officers discovered nearly 700 grammes of heroin in her luggage. Minh, who was found guilty on Monday by the southern business capital's People's Court, said she had been paid 800 dollars by an anonymous Vietnamese man to deliver the haul to a Taiwanese man, the official said. [continues 70 words]
HO CHI MINH CITY - Two Canadians could face the death penalty in Vietnam for possession of the drug ecstasy. Randy Sachs and Nguyen Van Hai were arrested in Ho Chi Minh City last May for allegedly possessing 1,000 tablets of ecstasy. An investigation is underway and formal charges have not yet been filed. It is not known if the death penalty will be asked for in this case, but Vietnam has imposed harsh sentences for drug trafficking in the past and routinely executes people who deal drugs. [continues 144 words]
HANOI, Vietnam (AP) - Vietnam's government plans to spend 77 billion dong (dlrs 5 million) on new equipment, training and drug-sniffing dogs to help its customs agency fight drug trafficking, an official said Friday. The money is to be spent over the next five years, the General Department of Customs official said. The official said it was important for Vietnam to curb drug smuggling at its borders rather than trying to stop the illegal trade inside the country. Most of Vietnam's known 120,000 drug addicts use heroin, which is smuggled from the notorious Golden Triangle where the borders of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand meet. Drug-related crimes have shown no sign of decline in Vietnam despite tough penalties. Last year, 55 people were put to death by firing squads for drug-related offenses. [end]
Five drug traffickers, including three women, were sentenced to death in northern Vietnam as part of the government's crackdown against the narcotics trade, officials said Monday. The People's Court in Hung Yen province handed eight other defendants prison sentences ranging from 13 years to life imprisonment on Saturday after a three-day trial, a court official told AFP. The gang, masterminded by the 39-year-old Do Thi Hoa, was convicted of trafficking nearly 10 kilograms of heroin since 1998 from neighbouring China and Laos to Hung Yen and the nation's capital, Hanoi. [continues 92 words]
HANOI, Vietnam (AP) -- Police searched Saturday for 101 drug addicts still at large from a group of 369 who escaped from a drug rehabilitation center in southern Vietnam. The escape on Thursday was the third mass breakout from the same drug rehabilitation center in less than seven months. It was triggered by the government's decision to extend the time drug addicts must stay in mandatory rehabilitation programs to at least one year, up from the previous three months, said an official at the center who spoke on condition of anonymity. [continues 129 words]
HANOI, Vietnam- A Taiwanese man and his Vietnamese associate were executed by a firing squad in southern Vietnam for producing illegal drugs, a court official said Wednesday. Chen Chi Tien, 48, and Tram Huy, a Vietnamese of Chinese origin, were executed in Ho Chi Minh City on Tuesday, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The Thanh Nien (Young People) newspaper reported that Chen came to Vietnam in 1989 as a businessman. In 1994, he rented land to set up a farm on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, but used the facility to produce illegal drugs, the newspaper said. [continues 110 words]
HANOI, Vietnam (AP) - The number of drug addicts with police records rose by more than 10 percent last year despite a government goal of reducing the number of addicts by 10 percent to 20 percent a year over the next five years, state-controlled media reported Saturday. The Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper quoted Vice Minister of Public Security Le The Tiem as saying the increase included a larger number of state employees. "Drug abuse has begun to spread to civil servants and state offices and there is a close connection between drug-related crimes ... and organized crime," he said. [continues 83 words]
Drug Users, Prostitutes Forced Into Program Designed To Stem HIV Despite High Relapse BA VI, VIETNAM -- This is the second time Dang Thuy Quynh has been sent to this government rehabilitation camp for prostitutes and drug users. This time, she says she will ask to stay longer when her one-year term ends. "I was a drug addict, and I'm afraid if I go back to the city it will be very easy to become addicted again," the 20-year-old said. [continues 761 words]
A court in central Vietnam began a trial Monday of 17 people charged with smuggling and selling heroin from neighboring Laos, the chief judge said. The trial in the central province of Ha Tinh attracted several hundred people who followed the proceedings over loudspeakers outside of the courtroom, said Nguyen Tri Tue, chief judge of the Ha Tinh provincial People's Court. The defendants told police they smuggled a total of 15.4 pounds of heroin from neighboring Laos on 11 occasions between March 1998 until they were arrested last February, he said. [continues 244 words]
Vietnamese courts sentenced 55 people to death last year on drug-related charges, state-controlled media reported Friday. Fifty-nine other people were given life sentences for drug offenses and 2,241 others received jail terms ranging from seven to 20 years, the official Vietnam News Agency said. No comparative figures were provided for previous years. In all, 5,948 drug-related cases were brought to trial last year, VNA said. Officials detected 12,811 drug-related cases involving 21,103 suspects, an increase of 24.4 percent and 8.2 percent, respectively, from the previous year, according to VNA. [continues 52 words]
HANOI, Vietnam (AP) -- Vietnamese police are searching for 37 drug addicts still at large from a group of 142 who escaped from a drug rehabilitation center in southern Vietnam, in the second massive breakout from the same center in less than a month, an official said Friday. The inmates climbed the center's two-meter (6.5 foot) wall while 12 guards were busy distributing meals to other inmates, said the official of the center in Can Tho province, 200 kilometers (125 miles) south of Ho Chi Minh City. [continues 395 words]
Drug Raves, Orgies Shock Officials HANOI, Vietnam - Late on a Thursday night, a prostitute on a rickety bicycle wears white plastic sandals and green-and-yellow striped pajamas. She pedals up to two American men standing outside the old "Hanoi Hilton" prison, sniffes and says, "You want boom-boom?" The men agree and pay the woman $40, which includes a bribe for the night watchman, then they duck into the prison - now a museum - to have sex in a room where U.S. pilots were held and tortured during the Vietnam War. [continues 799 words]
Cases Of HIV And AIDS Rising With Trade In Sex And Drugs HANOI -- It was late on a Thursday night, and the prostitute on the rickety bicycle was wearing white plastic sandals and green-and-yellow striped pajamas. She pedaled up to two American men standing outside the old "Hanoi Hilton" prison, smiled and said, "You want boom-boom?" The men agreed. They paid the woman $40, which included a bribe for the night watchman, then ducked into the prison -- which now houses a museum -- to have sex in a room where U.S. pilots were held and tortured during the Vietnam War. [continues 1037 words]
HANOI, Vietnam -- A court in northern Vietnam has finally sent a 91-year-old woman to jail after she was convicted repeatedly of drug dealing, police said Saturday. Courts in Thai Binh province had convicted Pham Thi Ngoc eight times in the past four years, but she remained free and unrepentant, police in Quang Trung precinct said. Ngoc received sentences ranging from two to 20 years, but the courts were reluctant to send her to jail because of her advanced age. [continues 74 words]
Hanoi, Vietnam -- A Vietnamese court has sentenced to death seven defendants after a trial of 23 people accused of drug trafficking and circulating counterfeit U.S. dollars, the official news media reported Saturday. The Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper said the court also handed out nine life sentences and jail terms of between 10 and 20 years to another seven defendants, including two women. The 23 people were found guilty of trafficking more than 91 packages of heroin, each weighing 75 pounds; 4.4 pounds of opium and counterfeit dollars with a face value of $92,200. Trafficking 3.3 ounces of heroin is punishable by death or life imprisonment. Execution in Vietnam is by firing squad. The trial had started Monday in the central province of Ha Tinh, about 250 miles south of Hanoi. [end]
HANOI, Vietnam (AP) -- A court in central Vietnam on Friday convicted 23 people on drug trafficking charges and sentenced seven to death in the country's second-largest illegal drug case, the chief judge said. Nine other defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment and the remaining seven received jail terms ranging from 10 years to 20 years, said Nguyen Tri Tue, chief judge of the Ha Tinh provincial People's Court. After a five-day trial, the court found the defendants guilty of trafficking 32.5 kilograms (71 pounds) of heroin and 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of opium from neighboring Laos to Vietnam from 1996 until they were arrested in late 1999. [continues 250 words]
A court in the commercial capital of Ho Chi Minh City sentenced a US national, also wanted by Belgian police, to death for heroin trafficking, just days after US President Bill Clinton's landmark visit, the official media reported Saturday. The court found Vietnamese-born Nguyen Manh Cuong, alias Bui Huu Tai, who fled to the United States in 1978 at the age of 10, guilty of "drug trafficking and storing and organizing the use of drugs," official dailies said. The court convicted Tai of trafficking 1.6 kilograms (three and a half pounds) of heroin, most of which he sold to a Japanese dealer, the city's Saigon Giaiphong daily said. [continues 467 words]
HANOI, Nov 23 (Reuters) - Prosecutors in Vietnam have proposed five death sentences in a trial of 28 people, 11 of them women, accused of involvement in heroin trafficking, official media reported on Thursday. Hanoi's police newspaper An Ninh Thu Do (Capital Security) said prosecutors were seeking the death sentence for one of the women defendents and were also calling for six life sentences. The Hanoi People's Court began hearing the case on Monday. Sentences are due to be announced on December 1 but in communist-ruled Vietnam these rarely differ from what prosecutors have sought. [continues 179 words]
A frail 74-year-old woman is set to be free as early as today to return from Vietnam to Canada, the country that has been her home since shortly after the Communist regime took over her native South Vietnam in 1975. Tran Thi Cam, a Canadian citizen, has spent more than four years in a Hanoi cell after a seriously flawed trial in which she was found guilty of drug trafficking. She has yet to be formally told that her 43-year-old daughter, Nguyen Thi Hiep, also a Canadian citizen, was executed on the same charges in April, despite Ottawa's pleas to the Vietnamese government to examine Toronto police evidence that suggested the pair's innocence. [continues 737 words]
Hanoi - Vietnam has freed the elderly mother of a Vietnamese-Canadian woman it executed earlier this year for heroin trafficking, part of a mass amnesty for 10,693 convicts, 61 of them foreigners. Tran Thi Cam, 74, of Brampton, Ont., was among 263 people freed Friday from Thanh Xuan, a prison set in rice fields west of Hanoi, under the amnesty to mark the communist state's 55th independence day that falls on Saturday. She had spent more than four years in jail for after being arrested at Hanoi airport in April 1996 and accused of trying to smuggle 5.45 kilograms of heroin on to a flight to Hong Kong. [continues 347 words]
Unaware Of Daughter's Execution A Brampton woman was to be freed from her Vietnamese prison today, still unaware that her daughter was executed four months ago. As the family of 74-year-old Tran Thi Cam holds a planned reunion at an amnesty celebration at her Thanh Xuan jail this afternoon, they will also be mourning the unexpected execution in April of Nguyen Thi Hiep. "I feel happy and sad and all mixed up," said Tran Hieu, 56, Nguyen's husband. Like the rest of her family, he won't tell his mother-in-law about the execution because he thinks the news would kill her. [continues 208 words]
Woman Executed In April The body of a Canadian woman whose execution by firing squad in Vietnam led to a diplomatic row between Ottawa and Hanoi has been quietly returned to her family. This suggests that Vietnam is now serious about its promise to release the woman's 74-year-old mother from prison in a general amnesty next week. Nguyen Thi Hiep, a 44-year-old Toronto seamstress, was shot in April after a conviction for drug smuggling. Her mother, Tran Thi Cam, a landed immigrant in Canada, was given a sentence of life in prison for the same incident. [continues 594 words]
Family Thanks Ottawa For Help Gaining Amnesty The family of a 74-year-old grandmother imprisoned in Vietnam for the past four years on a drug smuggling conviction is overjoyed that pressure by the Canadian government has led to a promise of amnesty. "We have great news," grandson Trung Le, 26, said in a telephone interview from Hanoi. "My grandmother will be set free. It is our big hope, our wishes come true," he said yesterday. "We would like to thank the Canadian government for helping us." [continues 494 words]
Hopes To Rebury Nguyen's Body, Free Her Mother They brought 200 red rosebuds to cover the makeshift grave of a Canadian executed on the killing grounds of a Hanoi prison for drug smuggling. Nguyen Thi Hiep's family had come halfway around the world to pay respects. They wept as they waded waist-deep into the killing ground - temporarily flooded - where the Toronto woman was shot, to place flowers on her shallow grave. Nguyen, 43, is the first Canadian known to have been executed on drug smuggling charges. Her body lies close to the spot where she was bound, gagged and blindfolded before facing a firing squad at dawn, Hanoi time, on April 25. [continues 511 words]
Hanoi Is Willing To Return The Remains Of An Executed Canadian Woman To Her Family And Release Her Mother HANOI - Vietnam is hoping to ease tensions with Canada by sending back the remains of an executed Canadian woman and considering the release of her sick mother, Vietnamese and Canadian officials said yesterday. Canada froze ministerial-level relations after Nguyen Thi Hiep, a Canadian citizen, was executed on April 24 on a drug smuggling conviction. Foreign Minister Nguyen Dy Nien sent a letter on Friday to his Canadian counterpart, Mr Lloyd Axworthy, saying that Hiep's crime -- smuggling 5.45 kg of heroin -- was serious and that her execution was "justified and correct". [continues 138 words]
HANOI - Canada has slapped new sanctions on Vietnam and cut off all ministerial-level contacts following last week's execution of a Canadian woman charged with drug trafficking in Hanoi. "We deplore this absolutely unacceptable conduct of the government of Vietnam," Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien told the House of Commons late Monday. "We have taken all steps possible to make sure it (Vietnam) understands that such action cannot be acceptable and that the Canadian government absolutely condemns it." Ottawa has already adamantly protested the April 25 execution of Nguyen Thi Hiep, a Canadian citizen born in Vietnam, who was shot by a firing squad in Hanoi on heroin trafficking charges. [continues 160 words]
Death by firing squad for woman caught trying to smuggle heroin is seen as demonstration of the country's crackdown on drugs HANOI -- Vietnam has demonstrated its determination to wage a tough fight against drug trafficking with the unprecedented execution of a Canadian woman convicted of drug trafficking. Nguyen Thi Hiep, convicted of trying to smuggle five kilograms of heroin out of the country four years ago, was executed by firing squad here at dawn on Tuesday. She was the first holder of a Western passport to be put to death in Vietnam and her execution was seen by observers here as a signal of an intensifying crackdown in the war on drugs. [continues 269 words]
MORE than 600 convicted Vietnamese drug addicts confined at a detoxification centre in Ho Chi Minh City attempted a mass breakout on Tuesday in protest at overcrowding, officials said yesterday. [end]
Government Toughens Penalties To Fight Surging Drug Use MUONG XEN, Vietnam -- These are the spare and daily facts of Luc Van Thanh's young life -- a frantic mother, a brother on death row, a pair of plastic sandals, some soiled pajamas, and the sweats and shivers of a heroin addict in a detox center. Just down the muddy mountain road, a village leader has an addiction of his own, an addiction with an undertow so powerful that by late morning, when Hoc Thanh Son has smoked up all of his cheap Sea Bird cigarettes, he takes out a sticky black ball of opium, places it expertly into a bamboo pipe, and smokes it right in front of some visiting government officials. [continues 982 words]
MUONG XEN, Vietnam -- Up, way up, tucked into the wild green yonder of Vietnam, that's where the opium grows best. Ethnic Hmong farmers have been growing opium poppies in these limestone mountains for hundreds of years, making medicinal opium for themselves, then selling or bartering the rest. Normally the farmers would have just finished the spring harvest about now, clearing an acre of poppies here, a half-acre there. Officials claim success But this year -- if you believe the government -- there was not a single poppy grown here along the border with Laos. Police and drug-control officials give the credit to a vigorous campaign of eradication and crop replacement in the upper reaches and rocky ramparts of Nghe An province. [continues 1078 words]
HANOI, Jan 6 (Reuters) - Vietnam sentenced 49 people to death and arrested 18,000 last year on drug-related crimes as the country wrestles with a rising drug problem, local media reported on Wednesday. "The number of detections was 35 percent higher than 1997, while those subject to litigation increased by 142.2 percent," the official Vietnam News said. The number arrested included 21 foreign nationals, the daily newspaper said. Truong Huu Quoc, head of the Police Ministry's drug control department, said 1,135 kg (2,503 lb) of opium, 60,000 opium doses, 56.57 kg (125 lb) of heroin and 103,000 doses of other unnamed narcotics were seized, the newspaper reported. [continues 141 words]
HANOI, Jan. 6 (Kyodo) -- Vietnamese police last year detected 9,000 drug-smuggling and trafficking cases, and arrested 18,600 people involved, a newspaper reported Wednesday. The figures in 1997 were 7,000 cases and 14,000 people arrested, the English-language daily Vietnam News said, quoting Truong Huu Quoc, director of the Drug Control Department of the Ministry of Public Security. Quoc said the police last year confiscated 1,135 kilograms of opium, 56.57 kg of heroin, and 398 kg of cannabis, most of it smuggled into Vietnam. [continues 162 words]
VIETNAM -- In Hanoi An ever-increasing flow of heroin through the north is being blamed for a HIV infections that now span the whole country. United Nations officials yesterday confirmed that the virus that leads to AIDS had now been registered in all Vietnam's 61 provinces since it was first detected in Ho Chi Minh City eight years ago. Among the latest cases is one involving a heroin user from Ha Giang in the far north - until now the only HIV-free province. The sufferer may have caught the disease elsewhere, however. [continues 253 words]
WASHINGTON--'Gray is the color of truth." So said McGeorge Bundy, 31 years ago, in a speech about the Vietnam War. Historical truths are always ambiguous, never more so than those that deal with a failed war. Most Americans long ago concluded that President Lyndon B. Johnson and his key aides--the Bundy brothers (McGeorge and William P.), Robert S. McNamara and other bright lights of the establishment--stumbled into that quagmire out of hubris and ignorance. Now, new archival evidence suggests that the truth is far more painful. [continues 1094 words]
Inside Vietnam
