„I want to quit, but I’ve relapsed so many times,” says Guo, sitting on a steel-frame bed in a Beijing rehabilitation clinic – his 18th attempt at breaking a 13-year addiction. „My sense of self-respect is gone.” Affluent Chinese like Guo are helping attract international drug traffickers from Central Asia and Myanmar. China already seizes more heroin than any other nation and lags behind only the US in confiscating amphetamines, according to the 2006 United Nations World Drug Report. The nation risks letting crime gangs gain a permanent foothold and an explosion of AIDS unless it can better police borders, says security expert Niklas Swanstrom. Rising incomes are creating demand for so-called party drugs such as ecstasy and methamphetamine even as heroin floods in from abroad. „Volvo wants to sell cars, Boeing wants to sell airplanes, and criminal networks in Afghanistan want to sell heroin,” says Swanstrom, program director at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, a research center run by Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington and Sweden’s Uppsala University. „They’ll have a tremendous market.” China’s official count of 1 million drug users is more like 15 million, and may quadruple if the state doesn’t spend more to fight smugglers, Swanstrom says.

„There is no cause for optimism,” said Chen Cunyi, deputy director general of China’s Narcotics Control Bureau, at a June briefing in Beijing. „In the past two years, we’ve noticed an increasing number of cases related to the infiltration of drugs.” Traffickers aren’t the only challenge. Chemicals used to make narcotics are leaking from Chinese factories to domestic and international producers, according to the UN. China already is Asia’s biggest supplier of methamphetamine, known as ice, the UN found. Chinese authorities reported intercepting 3,250 tons of so-called precursor chemicals destined for illegal export last year. The chemicals supply Central Asian heroin producers and are shipped as far away as the Netherlands and Belgium to ecstasy-makers, says Beate Hammond, drug control officer at the International Narcotics Control Board in Vienna. „The precursors for ecstasy, especially, are only manufactured in China,” Hammond says.

In local nightclubs and karaoke lounges, ecstasy is a status symbol among the new rich, says Giovanni Nicotera, the Beijing representative of the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime. Beijing alone is recruiting 10,000 volunteers to patrol drug-ridden nightspots, Xinhua news agency reported in November. „A lot of young people are pursuing drugs because it’s fashionable,” says Yang Maobin, who heads a Sino-American rehabilitation clinic in Yunnan province, which borders Myanmar. „The old problems have yet to be solved and new ones are constantly being created.” China jailed 38,000 drug offenders last year, seizing 6.9 tons of heroin, 5.5 tons of methamphetamine, 2.6 tons of ketamine, an animal tranquilizer, and 2.3 million ecstasy tablets. Punishments for smuggling, trafficking or manufacturing range from 15 years in prison to death. Ecstasy sells for $10 a pill, 40% of the cost in the US, according to the UN. Methamphetamine, at $6 a gram, is 94% cheaper and heroin, at $36 a gram, is 62% less.

At the China Drug Dependence Treatment Center, tucked in a narrow Beijing alley, methamphetamine and ecstasy users are joining heroin addicts like Guo, says Du Wanjun, who has run the clinic since it opened in 2000. Du has treated more than 6,800 people in six years, most ages 20 to 40, he says. Some drop by for a daily dose of methadone to damp heroin cravings. Others check in for a week of voluntary therapy and counseling. The clinic started a needle-exchange program in 2004. „We get a lot of people with decent incomes, lots of independent businesspeople,” says Du, who sees about 70 patients a day. The country’s compulsory clinics and reeducation-through-labor camps for relapsed addicts are full, Du says. China treated 70,000 addicts in labor camps last year, up 8.6% from 2004, and sent 298,000 for compulsory rehabilitation, a 9.3% increase, according to the narcotics bureau.

Needle-sharing already is rife. About 40% of people with AIDS are intravenous drug users, government figures show. The closely linked sex trade threatens to spread AIDS further into mainstream society, Yang says. The number of Chinese with AIDS rose 28% to 183,733 through October 13, Xinhua reported in November. The nation probably has 650,000 sufferers, according to the WHO and the UN. „China’s drug troubles aren’t just limited to drugs,” Yang says. China increases its anti-drug funding yearly, boosting patrols on borders and transport routes, says Gao Wei, information officer at the narcotics bureau. The country spent $13.8 million this year on a prevention and control network along its Central Asian and Southeast Asian borders, the China Daily newspaper reported last month. Still, drug rings are carving new routes, says Swanstrom of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute. „From Pakistan to Kazakhstan, it’s virtually impossible to control,” he says. „Even if China put every single soldier they have on that border, they’d still be able to penetrate it.” In the Beijing treatment center, addict Guo stares vacantly toward a hallway patrolled by a uniformed guard. He says he started smoking heroin with friends in his 20s. Guo pushes up the sleeves of velour pajamas to reveal collapsed veins. Needle scars cover his hands and feet. „I don’t even get a sensation from shooting up anymore,” he says. (Bloomberg)