Petr
04-23-07, 16:56
http://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/1101020520/cover.html
Chinese Junk
Drugs were the scourge of pre-communist China. Today the country is using again—and producing too
By HANNAH BEECH Sanjiaji
In this crowded marketplace in China's far-off Gansu province, where the wind whips yellow sand in your eyes and the guttural Mongol dialect assaults your ears, a man with three fistfuls of beard on his weathered face and a white prayer cap on his head shuffles up politely and asks, "Are you a foreigner?" You admit that you are, and he smiles, eyes crinkling: "I am from the hills, up there." The mountains he is pointing to rise in the distance like a desolate mirage. You look at them and say they are beautiful, even though to you they look only foreboding. He nods and agrees. "Yes, they are beautiful. Come, let us go visit and see its treasures."
Soon, you are jammed in a car with the old man, driving up rutted paths to a small village. It is the home of the Dongxiang people, a 280,000-strong ethnic minority descended from Muslim traders who plied the Silk Road. Veiled girls and skull-capped boys are swarming everywhere. The old man ushers you into a courtyard, where he is met by a 78-year-old friend who is a member of the local government. They clasp hands and touch their hearts, in the Muslim manner. A wrinkled woman serves tea, and you talk about the weather, Osama bin Laden and life in this remote outpost. Then, the conversation shifts to business matters. The elderly councilman says the price is $24 per gram—very cheap, very cheap. The purity is 55%, much higher than you can get in New York City or Beijing. The best way to smuggle it out is wrapped in plastic and deposited in your gas tank. The old men fall silent, and the wrinkled woman asks softly, "More tea?"
A century ago, imperial China was said to be home to 100 million drug users, languid addicts who filled opium dens and closed their eyes as their proud country ebbed into chaos and war. When the victorious communists took over in 1949, they eradicated drug use and cultivation in a matter of years. Beijing's cadres were quickly able to control practically everything: people's jobs, their marriages, even their sex lives. Naturally, opium, with its fantasy-fueling smoke, had no place in this Orwellian state. But today, as China loosens its hold on its economy and society, people are reveling in making their own choices once again. For many, the biggest lure is the greatest taboo: drugs. Independent sources estimate 7 million to 12 million drug addicts nationwide, and although that figure pales per capita compared with the U.S.'s, the number of junkies climbs each year. If the trend continues, in just five years China could have the most addicts per capita of any major economy. More than 80% are under 35 years of age, according to the central government, which keeps meticulous—if questionable—statistics but is far less adept at tackling this burgeoning problem.
In the chic clubs of Shanghai, teenagers now pop candy-colored ecstasy pills, while truck drivers use ice to stay awake on the ride home. But these days, the most alluring drug of all is a derivative of that ancient curse, opium: more than 70% of the nation's drug addicts are hooked on heroin, a powder sometimes known in slang as China White.
Nestled beside the twin drug kingdoms of Burma and Afghanistan, China has long provided a prime transit route for drugs on their way to the rest of Asia and beyond. As Thailand's drug interdiction efforts heightened in the 1990s, China's role as a narcotics conduit became even more crucial. At least half of the heroin from the Golden Triangle now travels through China, wending its way through the southern provinces of Yunnan, Guangxi and Guangdong before reaching international seaports. Just last month, a major raid on a Burmese- and Thai-led trafficking ring in Yunnan and Hong Kong's border town, Shenzhen, nabbed 357 kilos of heroin. Today, Chinese officials say a new pattern is emerging; they estimate that 25% of the heroin entering the country stays in the mainland for use by homegrown junkies, up from 10% five years ago. An ever-expanding myriad of routes now carries drugs from Burma, Laos, Afghanistan and Vietnam through China: eastward to Yunnan and Guangxi to feed druggies in the south and upward to Gansu and Ningxia to satisfy users in the north.
Windswept Gansu forms the spine of China's wild west. It is one of China's three most backward provinces. Eastern China may be glitz and glamour, but Gansu is desperate. You smell it in the air: Lanzhou, its capital, is the most polluted city on earth, near-bankrupt factories spewing smoke into the gray sky. In the countryside, Muslim minorities, like the Dongxiang and the Hui, try to survive on a land that gives back less each year. The desert is encroaching on Gansu, and farmers watch the coming sands resignedly, staring into the distance before wiping the dust from their eyes and coaxing a life from the parched ground. In China's cities, of course, life is only getting better. The people of Gansu have seen the transformation on their blurry TVs. A decade ago, the commercials were for refrigerators; now they are for cell phones. But back in Gansu, rural folk still live in the same mud-brick houses as before and many even lack running water. As the income disparity yawns ever wider, the poor of Gansu are desperate to catch up with their coastal cousins. So the Dongxiang and the Hui looked for new hope in an old habit: opium and its descendant, heroin.
At first in the early 1990s, adventurous Dongxiang donned their white hats and went traveling to Yunnan province, on the border with Burma and Vietnam. There, they cut deals with the Miao, the Bai and the Dai peoples, colorfully garbed minorities who slipped by foot across the Sino-Burmese frontier to buy fruit, vegetables and opium. The hill tribes of Yunnan liked the Dongxiang because they, too, were minorities marginalized by the Han Chinese majority. After buying the goods, the Dongxiang headed north to the mountains of Sichuan, where they trekked back to Gansu with the help of the Yi, another ethnic group living on the fringes of Chinese society. This northern drug route crossed some of China's poorest, most remote territory, connecting the country's disenfranchised minorities in an illicit trade. Police were wary of stopping the smuggling, fearing too many arrests would rouse the restive tribes. "Minorities have few other ways to make money," says a dealer in Lanzhou, who has traveled the heroin road dozens of times. "Even if they know that dealing can kill them, they do it because they have to live somehow." Trafficking just 50 grams means the death penalty in China—part of a central government initiative to toughen its already harsh stance on drugs—but its alienated ethnic tribes had few other options. So they passed the bags of white powder from tribe to tribe until addiction began to spread, primarily among the Han Chinese. In Lanzhou, for instance, almost all the primary dealers are Dongxiang; almost all the junkies are Han. "Yes, drugs are illegal," says a Dongxiang pusher. "But our people don't usually get hooked. It is only the Han who are weak, and we don't care so much about them because they have never cared about us."
Back in Gansu, the Dongxiang sold their stash to both dealers and users searching for the cheapest high. The powder the Dongxiang had bought for $8 a gram in Yunnan could be sold for $36 a gram in Lanzhou. Everyone was in on the trade, from pregnant women to clerics returning from prayer at the green-domed mosque. (Even last month, a Lanzhou University chemistry professor was arrested for advising an amphetamine and ecstasy trafficking ring.) Dealers came from all over China, smuggling the drug out in gas tanks, car tires and ingested condoms. Gansu's Sanjiaji township soon became one of the largest drug centers in China, after the border areas of Yunnan. By the mid-1990s, even English, Russian and German dealers were coming, because the purity of Sanjiaji heroin was high—and the cops were nowhere to be found. "Nobody overseas has heard of Gansu," says Ah Hui, a 26-year-old junkie in Lanzhou, whose teeth are ruined from heroin smoke. "But if people know heroin, they know of Sanjiaji."
By the late 1990s, though, provincial authorities were catching on and the Sanjiaji drug market was forced underground. Roads from Sichuan to Gansu were choked by police roadblocks. The Dongxiang mules still could get through by taking secret mountain paths, but they also needed a more ready supply. So they drew inspiration from tradition: a century ago, nearly 90% of Gansu's agricultural output was tied to the delicate poppy. Major cultivation had been stopped by the Communist Party in the 1950s. But the Dongxiang people still knew how to grow it, and they bought packs of poppy seed to sow themselves a future.
China is loath to admit that poppies are actually grown on home soil. Antidrug officials, like Yang Fengrui of the Public Security Bureau, prefer instead to remind the West of its complicity in China's drug habit: "Our country was very much victimized during the Opium Wars, and we can never forget that pain." Newspapers, too, like to blame "foreign devils" such as Burma for hooking China's young. But international drug analysts estimate that up to 15% of heroin consumed in China is now homegrown. And that percentage is expected to rise as domestic demand continues to surge. Some of China's opium is cultivated in Yunnan and Guangxi, but other regions, especially China's northwest, are now hustling to get in on the action. In 1998, the second biggest heroin seizure in Shanghai's modern history involved 63 kilos smuggled from Gansu's Guanghe county, which includes Sanjiaji. And last fall in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, a South Korean was executed for processing heroin for export to his home country. The source material for the drug? The opium poppies in the fields of Gansu.
The dragon came chasing Little Jie one night in 1996, in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen. Outside, young Chinese were trading their talents for a pocketful of cash. But Little Jie had already made money crooning Canto-pop songs at local nightclubs. People in his hometown of Lanzhou talked about how Little Jie had made it big, how he had even traveled to Hong Kong to sing his songs. But Little Jie felt empty. So that night, he took a hit. "That was the beginning," he says. "Or maybe the end."
That first hit turned into two, then 200, then so many that Little Jie lost count. To pay for the drugs, he played more nights at the clubs. Then, he found he didn't have enough time to sing anymore. His career was interfering with his drug habit, so the job had to go. Pretty soon Little Jie was dealing himself. He learned all the languages of the drug trade: Cantonese, Sichuanese, Dongxiang dialect. At first, he went to Sanjiaji to buy, dirtying his face and wearing ragged clothes to escape notice by undercover cops. Later, when he lacked the lucidity to do even that, he became a mule, swallowing condoms filled with heroin, ferrying them to Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing. A friend once ingested 20 condoms, each filled with two grams of heroin, and died. So Little Jie was careful: he only swallowed 19 rubbers at a time. Each trip earned him $430. He tried other jobs, too, like starring in a vcd called Grace Hong Kong Gay Boys. But he always returned to dealing. "I am only 27 years old," says Little Jie. "But I feel like I'm 50."
One rainy night last year in the central city of Chengdu, Little Jie was out pushing. It was muggy, and things didn't feel quite right. When the cops came, he was able to throw most of his stash onto the street, where it dissolved in puddles. If they had found the 50 grams on him, he could have faced the death penalty. Instead, he was sentenced to just one year in jail. Little Jie spent that time in a 50-sq-m cell, sharing the fetid space with 50 others. Skin diseases were so bad that inmates took turns burning one other with cigarettes to take their minds off the sores. Little Jie passed the time by keeping a diary on paper smuggled in by his mother, and by indulging his taste for drugs. Veteran prisoners collected cash from other inmates and scored from the jail guards. Convicts who were to be executed the next day had first dibs on the stash. Little Jie helped send off five people by providing them with a final smoke.
Today, Little Jie has been out of prison for just five days, and his eyes have not yet adjusted to the sunlight. He is wearing a new gray suit, too big in the shoulders for a man still shrunk by prison. At a local nightclub, he weaves past the prostitutes to sing one song for old time's sake. The crowd stares at him curiously, wondering who this man with the prison crew cut and ill-fitting suit might be. After he finishes, Little Jie bows and clasps his shaking hands around a beer. He doesn't know what he will do tomorrow or the day after. But the lure of drugs is already tugging at him. "I am a man who takes risks," he says, his eyes darting around the club. "If there is a chance to make money, I will go for it. I'll take every chance there is."
The Municipal Mandatory Rehabilitation Center in the sand-swept, northwestern city of Yinchuan is a place for those who took the risk and lost. Most of the 200 male inmates have been through the cycle: addiction, arrest, detox, rearrest. Brother Wu was out buying dog food back in January when the Yinchuan cops came calling. A friend had been arrested a couple days earlier and had given authorities a list of his fellow junkies. After a urine test proved positive, Brother Wu was thrown into the rehab center for six months. There are 695 mandatory drug treatment centers in China, and last year they were home to 216,000 addicts. Another 56,000 repeat junkies were sent without trial to "detoxification-through-labor" camps. In these grim places, inmates toil 16-hour days making deceptively cheerful products: stuffed animals, Christmas ornaments, paper valentines. hiv is rife in the rehab centers; the government estimates that 69% of all Chinese aids patients are heroin users.
Still, life isn't all bad in some compulsory detox camps. Just half-an-hour after entering the rehab center, Brother Wu watched a fellow addict reach over the cinder-block wall and grab a bag held up by a bamboo pole. In it were several grams of white powder. "It's easier to score inside rehab centers than outside," says Brother Wu, pushing his dreadlocks out of his face. "Lots of people don't want to leave because it's a stable source of heroin." In another mandatory detox center in Chengdu, junkies had it even easier: they bought their smack directly from the guards themselves. Nevertheless, Brother Wu was relieved when family connections and a $960 bribe to the police shaved three months off his sentence. Still, the plentiful heroin inside the rehab centers means that even the central government admits that 90% of Chinese addicts relapse once they leave; that might be because they were never clean in the first place.
Even in rehab centers where drugs are less abundant, officials make little effort to address the physiological and psychological needs of a heroin-addicted brain. Junkies are treated as criminals, which does little to help them kick the habit. "All they tell you is that you're evil," says Brother Wu, "so you figure that once you get out you might as well be evil and start using again." There is no attempt to offer counseling once inmates return home. In Gansu, for instance, provincial officials explain with a straight face that after addicts complete a three-month detox program, they are considered cured for life. And the thousands of repeat inmates? "Ah, they just weren't trying hard enough," insists an antidrug official in Lanzhou, where government coffers are padded by the $1,000 fee thousands of addicts must shell out for their compulsory rehab. "It's their fault, not ours."
With drug addiction soaring nationwide, many Chinese have begun looking for alternatives to the dismal state-run detox centers. Expensive and unorthodox remedies alike have flooded the market. A doctor in Beijing claims to cure heroin addiction through acupuncture, but he's closemouthed about his actual success rate. A detox center in Yunnan's capital, Kunming, offers addicts a spoonful of herbal pills and a dose of boot-camp discipline. The camp commandant is a stern-faced former People's Liberation Army officer, but he admits that his camp's relapse rate exceeds 70%. In Guangdong, American-style clinics have opened up, offering junkies a manicure-and-methadone package. The price tag at some of these rehab retreats tops $5,000 for a two-week stay, but there, too, the re-addiction rate is more than 50%. "We see the same addicts over and over," says a counselor at a Guangdong rehab clinic. "If they don't come in for a while, we get worried that maybe they have been finally caught by the drug and are dead."
For most first-time junkies, heroin symbolizes freedom, not entrapment. Two decades ago, the average Chinese wasn't free to choose much of anything: what to do, where to go, what to think. Families required kids to remain at home and work in the local commune. The government, too, wanted China's citizens to stay put, so it could track their movements. Society was safe, yes, but straitjacketed. The economic reforms that began in the 1980s, though, sent millions of Chinese spilling into the cities. China's carefully ordered society fractured, with families that had lived in one village for centuries now scattering across the nation. Lost in China's teeming cities, many turned to drugs. For dealers, too, the temptation was irresistible. Nobody was watching, nobody cared what they sold. But now, for the junkies and dealers alike, it is too late to turn back.
When Lao Xu first tried heroin, he was a 19-year-old country kid blinded by Shanghai's neon. He thought he would get work in one of the city's gleaming skyscrapers, but he ended up dancing for cash in a darkened nightclub. Heroin was another of Shanghai's surprises. He knew it was dangerous, but he tried it anyway. After all, a pale-faced dancer from far-off Gansu province needed something to make him hot in the capital of cool. And Lao Xu liked the social aspect of heroin, a bunch of guys sitting in a room, enjoying the rush and then the drowsy hours that followed. He missed his parents and his grandma, and here was a way to connect—a chemical club for China's displaced. But then one day he didn't need his friends around to enjoy his high. So he fired up the foil alone in the grungy bathroom of his tenement. "I started doing this because I wanted to be with friends," says Lao Xu. "Now I feel so alone."
Back in Lanzhou, Ah Hui went cold turkey, even attending church for a while to try to keep himself straight. But now he's sitting in room 602 of a grimy hotel, mesmerized as Xiao Jing, a sweet-faced wannabe actress, unloads her groceries. In one hand she holds a bag of fruit. In the other, a bag of heroin. They munch watermelon and watch as another junkie pours the heroin onto a 100-yuan note emblazoned with a portrait of Mao Zedong. The white powder lands smack on the Chairman's face. Ah Hui and Xiao Jing exhale and lean forward for what they say will be just one last hit.
Chinese Junk
Drugs were the scourge of pre-communist China. Today the country is using again—and producing too
By HANNAH BEECH Sanjiaji
In this crowded marketplace in China's far-off Gansu province, where the wind whips yellow sand in your eyes and the guttural Mongol dialect assaults your ears, a man with three fistfuls of beard on his weathered face and a white prayer cap on his head shuffles up politely and asks, "Are you a foreigner?" You admit that you are, and he smiles, eyes crinkling: "I am from the hills, up there." The mountains he is pointing to rise in the distance like a desolate mirage. You look at them and say they are beautiful, even though to you they look only foreboding. He nods and agrees. "Yes, they are beautiful. Come, let us go visit and see its treasures."
Soon, you are jammed in a car with the old man, driving up rutted paths to a small village. It is the home of the Dongxiang people, a 280,000-strong ethnic minority descended from Muslim traders who plied the Silk Road. Veiled girls and skull-capped boys are swarming everywhere. The old man ushers you into a courtyard, where he is met by a 78-year-old friend who is a member of the local government. They clasp hands and touch their hearts, in the Muslim manner. A wrinkled woman serves tea, and you talk about the weather, Osama bin Laden and life in this remote outpost. Then, the conversation shifts to business matters. The elderly councilman says the price is $24 per gram—very cheap, very cheap. The purity is 55%, much higher than you can get in New York City or Beijing. The best way to smuggle it out is wrapped in plastic and deposited in your gas tank. The old men fall silent, and the wrinkled woman asks softly, "More tea?"
A century ago, imperial China was said to be home to 100 million drug users, languid addicts who filled opium dens and closed their eyes as their proud country ebbed into chaos and war. When the victorious communists took over in 1949, they eradicated drug use and cultivation in a matter of years. Beijing's cadres were quickly able to control practically everything: people's jobs, their marriages, even their sex lives. Naturally, opium, with its fantasy-fueling smoke, had no place in this Orwellian state. But today, as China loosens its hold on its economy and society, people are reveling in making their own choices once again. For many, the biggest lure is the greatest taboo: drugs. Independent sources estimate 7 million to 12 million drug addicts nationwide, and although that figure pales per capita compared with the U.S.'s, the number of junkies climbs each year. If the trend continues, in just five years China could have the most addicts per capita of any major economy. More than 80% are under 35 years of age, according to the central government, which keeps meticulous—if questionable—statistics but is far less adept at tackling this burgeoning problem.
In the chic clubs of Shanghai, teenagers now pop candy-colored ecstasy pills, while truck drivers use ice to stay awake on the ride home. But these days, the most alluring drug of all is a derivative of that ancient curse, opium: more than 70% of the nation's drug addicts are hooked on heroin, a powder sometimes known in slang as China White.
Nestled beside the twin drug kingdoms of Burma and Afghanistan, China has long provided a prime transit route for drugs on their way to the rest of Asia and beyond. As Thailand's drug interdiction efforts heightened in the 1990s, China's role as a narcotics conduit became even more crucial. At least half of the heroin from the Golden Triangle now travels through China, wending its way through the southern provinces of Yunnan, Guangxi and Guangdong before reaching international seaports. Just last month, a major raid on a Burmese- and Thai-led trafficking ring in Yunnan and Hong Kong's border town, Shenzhen, nabbed 357 kilos of heroin. Today, Chinese officials say a new pattern is emerging; they estimate that 25% of the heroin entering the country stays in the mainland for use by homegrown junkies, up from 10% five years ago. An ever-expanding myriad of routes now carries drugs from Burma, Laos, Afghanistan and Vietnam through China: eastward to Yunnan and Guangxi to feed druggies in the south and upward to Gansu and Ningxia to satisfy users in the north.
Windswept Gansu forms the spine of China's wild west. It is one of China's three most backward provinces. Eastern China may be glitz and glamour, but Gansu is desperate. You smell it in the air: Lanzhou, its capital, is the most polluted city on earth, near-bankrupt factories spewing smoke into the gray sky. In the countryside, Muslim minorities, like the Dongxiang and the Hui, try to survive on a land that gives back less each year. The desert is encroaching on Gansu, and farmers watch the coming sands resignedly, staring into the distance before wiping the dust from their eyes and coaxing a life from the parched ground. In China's cities, of course, life is only getting better. The people of Gansu have seen the transformation on their blurry TVs. A decade ago, the commercials were for refrigerators; now they are for cell phones. But back in Gansu, rural folk still live in the same mud-brick houses as before and many even lack running water. As the income disparity yawns ever wider, the poor of Gansu are desperate to catch up with their coastal cousins. So the Dongxiang and the Hui looked for new hope in an old habit: opium and its descendant, heroin.
At first in the early 1990s, adventurous Dongxiang donned their white hats and went traveling to Yunnan province, on the border with Burma and Vietnam. There, they cut deals with the Miao, the Bai and the Dai peoples, colorfully garbed minorities who slipped by foot across the Sino-Burmese frontier to buy fruit, vegetables and opium. The hill tribes of Yunnan liked the Dongxiang because they, too, were minorities marginalized by the Han Chinese majority. After buying the goods, the Dongxiang headed north to the mountains of Sichuan, where they trekked back to Gansu with the help of the Yi, another ethnic group living on the fringes of Chinese society. This northern drug route crossed some of China's poorest, most remote territory, connecting the country's disenfranchised minorities in an illicit trade. Police were wary of stopping the smuggling, fearing too many arrests would rouse the restive tribes. "Minorities have few other ways to make money," says a dealer in Lanzhou, who has traveled the heroin road dozens of times. "Even if they know that dealing can kill them, they do it because they have to live somehow." Trafficking just 50 grams means the death penalty in China—part of a central government initiative to toughen its already harsh stance on drugs—but its alienated ethnic tribes had few other options. So they passed the bags of white powder from tribe to tribe until addiction began to spread, primarily among the Han Chinese. In Lanzhou, for instance, almost all the primary dealers are Dongxiang; almost all the junkies are Han. "Yes, drugs are illegal," says a Dongxiang pusher. "But our people don't usually get hooked. It is only the Han who are weak, and we don't care so much about them because they have never cared about us."
Back in Gansu, the Dongxiang sold their stash to both dealers and users searching for the cheapest high. The powder the Dongxiang had bought for $8 a gram in Yunnan could be sold for $36 a gram in Lanzhou. Everyone was in on the trade, from pregnant women to clerics returning from prayer at the green-domed mosque. (Even last month, a Lanzhou University chemistry professor was arrested for advising an amphetamine and ecstasy trafficking ring.) Dealers came from all over China, smuggling the drug out in gas tanks, car tires and ingested condoms. Gansu's Sanjiaji township soon became one of the largest drug centers in China, after the border areas of Yunnan. By the mid-1990s, even English, Russian and German dealers were coming, because the purity of Sanjiaji heroin was high—and the cops were nowhere to be found. "Nobody overseas has heard of Gansu," says Ah Hui, a 26-year-old junkie in Lanzhou, whose teeth are ruined from heroin smoke. "But if people know heroin, they know of Sanjiaji."
By the late 1990s, though, provincial authorities were catching on and the Sanjiaji drug market was forced underground. Roads from Sichuan to Gansu were choked by police roadblocks. The Dongxiang mules still could get through by taking secret mountain paths, but they also needed a more ready supply. So they drew inspiration from tradition: a century ago, nearly 90% of Gansu's agricultural output was tied to the delicate poppy. Major cultivation had been stopped by the Communist Party in the 1950s. But the Dongxiang people still knew how to grow it, and they bought packs of poppy seed to sow themselves a future.
China is loath to admit that poppies are actually grown on home soil. Antidrug officials, like Yang Fengrui of the Public Security Bureau, prefer instead to remind the West of its complicity in China's drug habit: "Our country was very much victimized during the Opium Wars, and we can never forget that pain." Newspapers, too, like to blame "foreign devils" such as Burma for hooking China's young. But international drug analysts estimate that up to 15% of heroin consumed in China is now homegrown. And that percentage is expected to rise as domestic demand continues to surge. Some of China's opium is cultivated in Yunnan and Guangxi, but other regions, especially China's northwest, are now hustling to get in on the action. In 1998, the second biggest heroin seizure in Shanghai's modern history involved 63 kilos smuggled from Gansu's Guanghe county, which includes Sanjiaji. And last fall in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, a South Korean was executed for processing heroin for export to his home country. The source material for the drug? The opium poppies in the fields of Gansu.
The dragon came chasing Little Jie one night in 1996, in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen. Outside, young Chinese were trading their talents for a pocketful of cash. But Little Jie had already made money crooning Canto-pop songs at local nightclubs. People in his hometown of Lanzhou talked about how Little Jie had made it big, how he had even traveled to Hong Kong to sing his songs. But Little Jie felt empty. So that night, he took a hit. "That was the beginning," he says. "Or maybe the end."
That first hit turned into two, then 200, then so many that Little Jie lost count. To pay for the drugs, he played more nights at the clubs. Then, he found he didn't have enough time to sing anymore. His career was interfering with his drug habit, so the job had to go. Pretty soon Little Jie was dealing himself. He learned all the languages of the drug trade: Cantonese, Sichuanese, Dongxiang dialect. At first, he went to Sanjiaji to buy, dirtying his face and wearing ragged clothes to escape notice by undercover cops. Later, when he lacked the lucidity to do even that, he became a mule, swallowing condoms filled with heroin, ferrying them to Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing. A friend once ingested 20 condoms, each filled with two grams of heroin, and died. So Little Jie was careful: he only swallowed 19 rubbers at a time. Each trip earned him $430. He tried other jobs, too, like starring in a vcd called Grace Hong Kong Gay Boys. But he always returned to dealing. "I am only 27 years old," says Little Jie. "But I feel like I'm 50."
One rainy night last year in the central city of Chengdu, Little Jie was out pushing. It was muggy, and things didn't feel quite right. When the cops came, he was able to throw most of his stash onto the street, where it dissolved in puddles. If they had found the 50 grams on him, he could have faced the death penalty. Instead, he was sentenced to just one year in jail. Little Jie spent that time in a 50-sq-m cell, sharing the fetid space with 50 others. Skin diseases were so bad that inmates took turns burning one other with cigarettes to take their minds off the sores. Little Jie passed the time by keeping a diary on paper smuggled in by his mother, and by indulging his taste for drugs. Veteran prisoners collected cash from other inmates and scored from the jail guards. Convicts who were to be executed the next day had first dibs on the stash. Little Jie helped send off five people by providing them with a final smoke.
Today, Little Jie has been out of prison for just five days, and his eyes have not yet adjusted to the sunlight. He is wearing a new gray suit, too big in the shoulders for a man still shrunk by prison. At a local nightclub, he weaves past the prostitutes to sing one song for old time's sake. The crowd stares at him curiously, wondering who this man with the prison crew cut and ill-fitting suit might be. After he finishes, Little Jie bows and clasps his shaking hands around a beer. He doesn't know what he will do tomorrow or the day after. But the lure of drugs is already tugging at him. "I am a man who takes risks," he says, his eyes darting around the club. "If there is a chance to make money, I will go for it. I'll take every chance there is."
The Municipal Mandatory Rehabilitation Center in the sand-swept, northwestern city of Yinchuan is a place for those who took the risk and lost. Most of the 200 male inmates have been through the cycle: addiction, arrest, detox, rearrest. Brother Wu was out buying dog food back in January when the Yinchuan cops came calling. A friend had been arrested a couple days earlier and had given authorities a list of his fellow junkies. After a urine test proved positive, Brother Wu was thrown into the rehab center for six months. There are 695 mandatory drug treatment centers in China, and last year they were home to 216,000 addicts. Another 56,000 repeat junkies were sent without trial to "detoxification-through-labor" camps. In these grim places, inmates toil 16-hour days making deceptively cheerful products: stuffed animals, Christmas ornaments, paper valentines. hiv is rife in the rehab centers; the government estimates that 69% of all Chinese aids patients are heroin users.
Still, life isn't all bad in some compulsory detox camps. Just half-an-hour after entering the rehab center, Brother Wu watched a fellow addict reach over the cinder-block wall and grab a bag held up by a bamboo pole. In it were several grams of white powder. "It's easier to score inside rehab centers than outside," says Brother Wu, pushing his dreadlocks out of his face. "Lots of people don't want to leave because it's a stable source of heroin." In another mandatory detox center in Chengdu, junkies had it even easier: they bought their smack directly from the guards themselves. Nevertheless, Brother Wu was relieved when family connections and a $960 bribe to the police shaved three months off his sentence. Still, the plentiful heroin inside the rehab centers means that even the central government admits that 90% of Chinese addicts relapse once they leave; that might be because they were never clean in the first place.
Even in rehab centers where drugs are less abundant, officials make little effort to address the physiological and psychological needs of a heroin-addicted brain. Junkies are treated as criminals, which does little to help them kick the habit. "All they tell you is that you're evil," says Brother Wu, "so you figure that once you get out you might as well be evil and start using again." There is no attempt to offer counseling once inmates return home. In Gansu, for instance, provincial officials explain with a straight face that after addicts complete a three-month detox program, they are considered cured for life. And the thousands of repeat inmates? "Ah, they just weren't trying hard enough," insists an antidrug official in Lanzhou, where government coffers are padded by the $1,000 fee thousands of addicts must shell out for their compulsory rehab. "It's their fault, not ours."
With drug addiction soaring nationwide, many Chinese have begun looking for alternatives to the dismal state-run detox centers. Expensive and unorthodox remedies alike have flooded the market. A doctor in Beijing claims to cure heroin addiction through acupuncture, but he's closemouthed about his actual success rate. A detox center in Yunnan's capital, Kunming, offers addicts a spoonful of herbal pills and a dose of boot-camp discipline. The camp commandant is a stern-faced former People's Liberation Army officer, but he admits that his camp's relapse rate exceeds 70%. In Guangdong, American-style clinics have opened up, offering junkies a manicure-and-methadone package. The price tag at some of these rehab retreats tops $5,000 for a two-week stay, but there, too, the re-addiction rate is more than 50%. "We see the same addicts over and over," says a counselor at a Guangdong rehab clinic. "If they don't come in for a while, we get worried that maybe they have been finally caught by the drug and are dead."
For most first-time junkies, heroin symbolizes freedom, not entrapment. Two decades ago, the average Chinese wasn't free to choose much of anything: what to do, where to go, what to think. Families required kids to remain at home and work in the local commune. The government, too, wanted China's citizens to stay put, so it could track their movements. Society was safe, yes, but straitjacketed. The economic reforms that began in the 1980s, though, sent millions of Chinese spilling into the cities. China's carefully ordered society fractured, with families that had lived in one village for centuries now scattering across the nation. Lost in China's teeming cities, many turned to drugs. For dealers, too, the temptation was irresistible. Nobody was watching, nobody cared what they sold. But now, for the junkies and dealers alike, it is too late to turn back.
When Lao Xu first tried heroin, he was a 19-year-old country kid blinded by Shanghai's neon. He thought he would get work in one of the city's gleaming skyscrapers, but he ended up dancing for cash in a darkened nightclub. Heroin was another of Shanghai's surprises. He knew it was dangerous, but he tried it anyway. After all, a pale-faced dancer from far-off Gansu province needed something to make him hot in the capital of cool. And Lao Xu liked the social aspect of heroin, a bunch of guys sitting in a room, enjoying the rush and then the drowsy hours that followed. He missed his parents and his grandma, and here was a way to connect—a chemical club for China's displaced. But then one day he didn't need his friends around to enjoy his high. So he fired up the foil alone in the grungy bathroom of his tenement. "I started doing this because I wanted to be with friends," says Lao Xu. "Now I feel so alone."
Back in Lanzhou, Ah Hui went cold turkey, even attending church for a while to try to keep himself straight. But now he's sitting in room 602 of a grimy hotel, mesmerized as Xiao Jing, a sweet-faced wannabe actress, unloads her groceries. In one hand she holds a bag of fruit. In the other, a bag of heroin. They munch watermelon and watch as another junkie pours the heroin onto a 100-yuan note emblazoned with a portrait of Mao Zedong. The white powder lands smack on the Chairman's face. Ah Hui and Xiao Jing exhale and lean forward for what they say will be just one last hit.