VIETNAM-DRUGS: Colonial Era Opium Trade Still Haunts Hanoi Today

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Serguei Blagov

HANOI, Jul 16 1996 (IPS) - The production and trade of illegal drugs, a legacy of Indochina’s colonial past, is posing new headaches for Vietnamese authorities who report spreading drug addiction among the country’s youth.

Small packages of heroin, comprising 20 milligrammes of the drug, are now readily available on city streets for 20,000-30,000 dongs (about two to three dollars) and are becoming increasingly popular among students, authorities note.

Quang Huu Dung, Deputy Chief of Criminal Investigation Department of Ho Chi Minh city’s police, says drug peddlers usually start the students of softer drugs like marijuana, packaged in cigarette form.

Once hooked, the richer youth are subsequently sold opium-laced cigarettes which can cost as much 250,000 dongs (25 dollars).

One high school in Hon Gai, northern Quang Ninh province, recently reported 26 drug-addicts among its student body. Earlier this year another high school reported that three students, under the influence of cocaine, had assaulted a teacher with knives.

Much of the drugs reach the capital Hanoi and the southern Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) from the highland areas where opium production and trade has its roots in a colonial era when war-torn Indochina proved to be fertile ground for an illegal trade that continues to flourish today.

As early as the 1830s British opium began flooding into Vietnam from southern China.

But it was the French who established an opium franchise to put their new colony on paying basis only six months after they annexed Saigon in 1862.

At the beginning of World War II the French administration continued to rely heavily on its opium monopoly. Indochina’s 2,500 opium dens were maintaining more than 100,000 addicts and providing 15 per cent of all tax revenues.

The French imported almost 60 tons of opium annually from Iran and Turkey to supply the vast enterprise.

When World War II erupted in 1939, Indochina was cut off from the poppy fields in the Middle East. The solution: increase the opium harvest in the region. Indochina’s opium production jumped from 7.5 tons in 1940 to 60 tons in 1944.

By then, statistics show that the Indochina region was home to more than 100,000 addicts.

At the end of World War II in 1945, Paris gave in to international pressure and in 1946, ended its official sanctioning of the opium trade.

But desperately short of funds, French intelligence and paramilitary agencies took over the opium traffic in order to finance their covert operations during the first Indochina War from 1946 to 1954.

According to American writer Alfred McCoy, this clandestine opium traffic produced a legacy of Corsican narcotics syndicates who decades later remained important figures in the international narcotics trade.

Ethnic minorities in the region fighting for independence from central authorities, or simply trying to sustain their livelihoods, have also fed off the opium drug trade. This is largely because the opium poppy is easy to grow and it is well suited to hillside cultivation as it flourishes in poor soil.

It is almost always cultivated at elevations higher than 600 metres above the sea level. These areas in Indochina are usually inhabited by nomadic ethnic minorities.

In recent times, the Vietnamese authorities in conjunction with the United Nations, have been channeling funds into the minority areas in an effort to get the local residents to switch from poppy to cash crop production.

The government says its Drug Control Master Plan aims to eliminate all opium poppy cultivation in the country by the year 2000, and establish sustainable alternative measures to prevent future cultivation.

The campaign is in part funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) which provided one million dollars to establish six self-sustained highland community based projects, addressing drug demand reduction and related socio-economic needs. Experts believe these pilot projects can be expanded and replicated in other districts.

The United Nations Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) has also provided four million dollars for a major eradication project in Ky Son district in Nghe An province in central Vietnam, a major opium producing area in the country.

So far the programmes have reaped some success with acreage of opium plantations having dropped from an estimated 20,000 hectares to 4,000.

“The real issue of the opium poppy eradication campaign is the need for social and economic development of the opium-growing areas,” says Dr Be Truong Thanh, coordinator of the government’s drug control programme.

But authorities worry that their efforts to cut off supplies from the rural area are being undermined by growing demand in urban Vietnam where a more affluent population is supplied by drugs imported from the region.

Official documents show drugs now enter Vietnam overland from Thailand and China through Laos, where fluid borders and lack of personnel to police the trade make detection difficult. Shipments have also been detected coming from southern Laos through Cambodia, and by boat from southern Cambodia ports.

Once inside Vietnam, traffickers avoid detection by using motorbikes, small trucks and foot carriers to move the narcotics into major cities for sale or redistribution.

“In Vietnam, there are 185,000 drug addicts nationwide, up from 150,000 two years ago,” observes Roy D. Morey, UNDP resident representative in Hanoi. In Ho Chi Minh City alone there are some 30,000 to 50,000 hard-core addicts.

Alarmed by the rise in drug addicts, the authorities have resorted to tough measures to combat the illegal trade with legislation introduced in 1992, making it a capital offence to peddle drugs.

Since then, 12 drug traffickers, mainly foreigners, have been sentenced to death by the law courts.

Wong Chishin, a Hong Kong resident with a British passport was executed by a firing squad last year. He had been arrested by Vietnamese customs officials when trying to smuggle five kilogrammes of heroin from Bangkok, Thailand to Frankfurt, Germany, via Ho Chi Minh City.

Earlier this year Kong Thomsam, 33, and Ho Kamweng, 27, Macao residents with Portuguese passports, were arrested in Tan Son Nhat airport with 19 kgs of heroin.

Since the beginning of this year 410 people have been arrested in Vietnam for drug-related offences. The police confiscated 431 kgs of raw opium and 35 kgs of heroin.