Opium Addiction Makes Alarming Vietnam Return

HANOI, Vietnam —  A couple sell their children to buy opium, an addict kills four people and himself in a fit, a woman murders her husband for putting his habit before his family. Opium is making a comeback in Vietnam.

Production and consumption of the drug never completely vanished from Vietnam, but authorities now publish increasingly alarmist reports on the subject.

More people are using opium every day, experts say, from unemployed youths in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to ethnic minorities in the country’s mountainous northwest.

As a sign of the times, opium derivatives taken intravenously are competing with the traditional opium paste--rolled, heated over a candle flame and inhaled slowly while the user lies on a traditional Vietnamese floor mat.

Beautifully sculptured and decorated opium pipes that used to delight foreign tourists visiting Vietnam are increasingly resuming their original function.

The army daily Quan Doi Nhan Dan, which recently reported a litany of sordid crimes provoked by opium addiction, estimated the annual opium consumption in northwestern Vietnam at $7.7 million.

“That figure represents more than double the budget of a single province in 1990,” the paper said of the mountainous region.

More than 40,000 opium users live in the four northwestern provinces, Quan Doi Nhan Dan said, adding “in a district of nearly 30,000 in this region, one inhabitant in 10 is an addict.”

Young people could account for 80% of users of opium and its derivatives in the region, Vietnam’s principal poppy-growing area, Quan Doi Nhan Dan said.

Laos, which borders some of these provinces, is the third-largest opium producer in the world, after Burma and Afghanistan.

The drug’s comeback may be a result of the difficult agricultural situation in the northwest, whose inhabitants view poppies as an increasingly important backup crop, one Vietnamese expert said.

Corrupt officials in local government or the ruling Communist Party “who do nothing to check production” are also to blame, he said.