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Asia Buzz: Enter the Dragon
Saigon falls victim to the scourge of heroin
By TERRY McCARTHY
June
28, 2000
Web posted at 3:30 p.m. Hong Kong time, 3:30 a.m. EDT
Of all countries in Asia, where would you expect to find the most serious drug problems? Thailand? Perhaps the Philippines, or parts of southern China. But Vietnam? Isn't this the most tightly controlled society in Asia, famous for its block-by-block policing where nothing happens without the local security office finding out? Isn't this the country where the old titans of the Communist Party have such absolute control that nobody dares to step out of line. The country that makes China's Communist Party look positively liberal?
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Well, yes -- and that may be part of the problem. Much of the hope
that grew in the country around normalization of ties with the U.S.
in 1994, and the subsequent flood of foreign businesses into Vietnam,
has evaporated. The apparatchiks in Hanoi were simply too nervous
about losing power and control to really open the country to the world.
Young people, who only a few years ago clamored to get well-paying
jobs with foreign companies, now face a glum and uncertain future.
Unemployment is chronic. Disillusionment in the younger generation
is everywhere.
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Enter the dragon -- or the tail of the dragon, as heroin is often
referred to. Huge quantities of opium are grown and processed in
the Golden Triangle area of Burma and Laos across the border from
northeastern Thailand. But the drugs need a way out from these landlocked
mountain valleys. Corrupt officers in the Thai army used to facilitate
shipments down through Thailand, but efforts have been made -- at
the insistence of the U.S. -- to stop that.
So the traffickers have been seeking alternate routes. Southern
China is one of them, although the Chinese are fairly aggressive
in applying the death penalty to drug traffickers. And now one of
the big channels for heroin is through Laos and into Vietnam, around
the city of Vinh (the world's ugliest city, for anyone who has been
there. Completely destroyed by U.S. bombers during the war because
it stood at the top of the Ho Chi Minh trail, the city was rebuilt
in nightmarish Stalinist concrete design by a bunch of East German
architects who were clearly taking some hallucinogenic drugs worse
than heroin at the time). From Vinh, the heroin can be loaded onto
ships in small coastal ports and transported off to the U.S.
It seems that at the beginning, greedy police officers thought this
would be a good way of earning money, taking a cut from the traffickers.
What they didn't realize at the time was that there would be considerable
leakage -- a portion of the consignments would stay in Vietnam,
for sale locally. And that is what happened, arriving at an explosive
time -- young people with suddenly elevated expectations of life,
but with nowhere to take all their energy.
So now, Saigon has a huge population of heroin addicts with entire
parks in the city given over to junkies at night. Small alleyways
are littered with needles, and the drug can be bought on street
corners and around nightclubs almost at will. In the discotheques,
at least half the crowd dancing is likely to be on ecstasy -- in
the bathrooms there are signs saying drugs are forbidden by the
management, but nobody seems to care. AIDS has also shot up with
the needle users, and many of the female drug addicts have turned
to prostitution to finance their habit, which of course only makes
the HIV infection rates even worse.
The government has belatedly realized things are getting out of
control -- this week a court in Nam Dinh handed down 11 death sentences
to men found guilty of trafficking 250 kilograms of heroin, along
with 289 kilos of opium. In the first nine months of last year 18,000
people were arrested for drug smuggling in Vietnam, and 60 of them
were sentenced to death.
But the drug habit, once established, is hard to shake, as the U.S.
has found out to its detriment. Vietnam may not be open to the benefits
of globalization and world trade -- but it has certainly fallen
victim to one of the major evils of international drug syndicates.
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