Migrant Worker

I really have no intent to write about drugs on a regular basis, but for some reason I have been hearing a lot about the illegal drug trade in the last few days. Tonight at dinner with some staff from CBIK, the topic came up yet again. A couple friends were about to head off on a trip to a few of the organization’s project sites in northwest Yunnan, and they were being accompanied by a British photographer who is travelling along the Mekong river. Being a photojournalist on his first trip to Yunnan, he was interested in all the usual squalor: drug trade, sex trade, HIV rates, illegals from Myanmar, and so on. And of course, our table of local NGO types were eager to oblige with tales of woe.

He asked briefly about whether meth is a problem in China, which brought to mind this article which I’d seen earlier in the day (the full text is copied here, apparently details are not forthcoming):

POLICE in Lincang City in Yunnan Province detained a drug-smuggling suspect and seized over 10 kilograms of methamphetamine hydrochloride, also named “ice.” Police said the suspect was attempting to smuggle the drug from Myanmar to China. The captured suspect said another suspect gave him 15,000 yuan (US$1,875) and asked him to carry the drug into China.

And indeed, the Chinese also refer to meth as ice - 冰 - which surprises me to some degree because I always thought of that as slang that originated in my hometown. I don’t have any personal experience with meth (does it look like ice?) but I have always been vaguely aware of it, due to the incredible prevalence of use across poor, rural areas of the west and Midwest (read, South Dakota). As an elementary school student, I remember my family speculating that the falling-apart house filled with 20-somethings across the street was a “meth lab,” with a complicated code for dealers or buyers based on use of their porch light. And indeed, one night the police showed up en force. As to whether the place was actually a meth lab, I have no idea. It was probably 10 years later that I finally figured out what meth meant.

Trolling around to see if meth use is ACTUALLY higher in South Dakota than other places, I discovered a great article on binge drinking (and a brief mention of meth) in yesterday’s New York Times. The headline points to “boredom” as a cause of these destructive behaviors, which I guess has some value. Apparently the difference between normal SD teens and us nerdy ones was that when we got bored, we climbed public buildings at night, researched federalism, and volunteered for Senator Daschle (RIP).

On an only somewhat related note, my search for meth-related South Dakota information on the web also turned up this piece by the folks over at stopthedrugwar.org

Although China has long waged war on drug users and traffickers, it has never had statutes aimed specifically at the drug trade and dealing with drug users. That is about to change. Chinese lawmakers Tuesday began debating a new bill that would expand police powers to crack down on the cross-border drug trade and set standards for drug treatment, the Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported. […] Police would also be granted the power to force suspected drug users to submit blood or urine samples — a practice so far limited to primitive places like South Dakota — and owners of bars and nightclubs would have to post anti-drug propaganda on their premises. (emphasis added)

Primitive? Primitive? Hey. I resent that.

Photocred to Nada*