The Tyranny of Chinese "Drug Treatment"

This article was posted today from the New York Times. Kafkaesque. The author is Andrew Jacobs:


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 Fu happily inhaled.

The next day, three policemen showed up at her door.

"They asked me to urinate in a cup," she 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 meth, Fu, 41, was promptly sent to one of China's compulsory drug rehabilitation centers. The minimum stay is two years, and life is an unremitting gantlet of physical abuse and forced labor 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, as many as a half-million Chinese citizens are held at these centers at any given time. Detentions are meted out by the police without trials, judges or appeals. Created in 2008 as part of a reform effort to grapple with the country's growing narcotics problem, the centers, lawyers and drug experts say, have become de facto penal colonies where inmates are sent to factories and farms, fed substandard food and denied basic medical care.

"They call them detoxification centers, 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."

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

The report, titled "Where Darkness Knows No Limits," calls on the government to immediately shut down the detention centers.

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 centers for up to four years of therapeutic follow-up.

But substance abuse experts say the system, part of a stated "people centered" approach to dealing with addiction, has simply given the old system a new name. What is worse, they say, is that it expands the six-month compulsory detentions of old into two-year periods that the authorities can extend by five years.

The community-based rehabilitation centers, treatment experts add, have yet to be established.

Wang Xiaoguang, the vice director of Daytop, an American-affiliated drug-treatment residence in Yunnan province, said the government detox centers were little more than business ventures run by the police. Detainees, he said, spend their days working at chicken farms or shoe factories that have contracts with the local police; drug treatment, counseling and vocational training are almost nonexistent.

"I don't think this is the ideal situation for people trying to recover from addiction," Wang said in a phone interview.

The Office of National Narcotics Control Commission did not respond to requests for comment.