Category Archives: drugs

by | 1 July 2012 · 3:01 pm

Punitive Social Work in Vietnam

From: Vietnam: Rising Dragon, by Bill Hayton (Yale U. Press, 2010), Kindle Loc. 1379-1432:

The official response to public prostitution, public drug use and public vagrancy is the same: first of all try to persuade the offender to change their uncivilised lifestyle and then, if they fail to reform, remove them from the city. Control of what the authorities still call ‘social evil’ falls, not to the police, but to the local People’s Committee. Party cadres will visit uncivilised households, Women’s Union activists will try to persuade prostitutes to give up their trade and local neighbourhood wardens will try to organise neighbours to fight antisocial behaviour. But if they fail then the People’s Committee – not the court – will order detention. The campaign to promote civilised living has co-opted the old ways of dealing with social problems: exclusion and re-education.

From political dissidents in the 1950s, to army officers from the defeated south in the 1970s, to prostitutes and drug users now, the Party has long treated ‘deviants’ on the premise that it can change their minds and make them ‘better’ citizens. Re-education is an unsettling combination of liberalism and totalitarianism. On the one hand the regime believes that most of those with unacceptable behaviour can be ‘reformed’, but on the other it has a very rigid definition of acceptable behaviour. In practice, re-education has been far from liberal. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of former southern soldiers, officials and dissidents died from abuse and neglect in re-education camps after the war and these days the centres set up to reform cases of ‘social evil’ more often harm their inmates than help them.

Male drug users are sent to ‘06 centres’. Female sex workers, who may also be drug users, are sent to ‘05 centres’ and street children to social protection centres. These are usually in remote places and although they are managed by the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs (MoLISA) rather than the Ministry of Public Security, in practice they are run like prisons. There are more than 80 state-run 06 centres in the country, each holding around a thousand inmates. There are few, if any, trained drugs counsellors or social workers in the centres; staff are simply allocated to work there by the Ministry. Inmates are all treated the same; little attempt is made to understand individuals or why they might have become involved with drugs or sex work. Re-education isn’t exactly stimulating. Half the day is spent memorising Party positions and the laws on crime, and chanting slogans such as: ‘The whole nation condemns social evil’. The rest is spent performing manual labour. The inmates wear blue striped pyjamas, conditions are hard and they are frequently beaten.

Unsurprisingly, the centres usually fail. They keep people off the streets for two or three years but then return them to the same neighbourhood and the same social problems, and the result is almost always the same. They’re then likely to be picked up again and sent away for another spell in the camp. While the centres may give the authorities the impression that they’re in control of the problem, in many ways they’ve made it worse. Surveys suggest that 60 per cent of the inmates of 06 centres are now HIV-positive. Though the authorities deny it, intravenous drug use is rampant and there is plenty of unsafe sex between inmates. Given that neither problem is supposed to exist, MoLISA refuses to provide them with clean needles or condoms. Maintaining the Party line has failed to change inmates’ behaviour. Instead it’s just increased the prevalence of HIV.

Party experts and government officials are struggling to find new ideas for ways to cope with the problems of the new society they are building. The top of the hierarchy clings to the utopian idea that socialism can solve everything. Theoreticians still argue over the legacies of social thinkers like Karl Marx, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim and their implications for solving the country’s problems. The lower levels try to cope using whatever resources are to hand. Social work – once abolished on the grounds that it was unnecessary under socialism – is being encouraged again. Religious groups, including the Catholic Church, are being allowed to provide social care; ‘empathy groups’ of families of people with HIV are being allowed to organise autonomously of the Party; and international experts from the UN and other agencies are being invited to advise on new strategies. Western-trained practitioners are turning local NGOs into agencies to try to treat the problems directly.

The problems are tying the Party’s ideologues up in ideological knots. For decades they argued that social evils were the result of foreign and capitalist influence, starting under the French and continuing under the Americans. Trying to explain why they have surged now, under Party leadership, has pitted theorists who hold the line that socialism has the answers against practitioners who work on the assumption that it hasn’t. It seems unlikely that the old line can be held for much longer but it still has powerful supporters. They don’t understand the new world they have created – they still announce strategies calling for a 90 per cent reduction in crime, for example – and for the time being it’s easier to fall back on traditional ideas than seek out new ones. Other arguments are familiar from other countries. Why should money be spent on those who’ve abused the Party, state and nation’s generosity when loyal citizens get by with less? Many people, addicts’ families included, see the re-education camps as a good solution to the problem. Families have been known to imprison their own children at home or bribe the army to send them to bases on remote islands to prevent them using drugs – why should they be opposed to sending them away to an 06 centre?

Similar dilemmas exist over street children. There are few sights which offend urbanites – Vietnamese and foreign – more than seeing children living on the street. Compared with most cities in Asia, the number of visible street children in Vietnam is relatively small, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. The authorities in the two big cities take dramatically contrasting approaches. Hanoi tends to be more hard line, regularly rounding up apparently vagrant children. In Ho Chi Minh City they are more tolerant. In Hanoi shoe-shine boys have learnt not to carry the tools of their trade openly. Instead they buy a school uniform and carry the brushes and polish in a rucksack so that the police don’t spot them. They also take less visible jobs, working in the markets rather than selling postcards in the tourist areas. In Ho Chi Minh City, tolerance has allowed well-organised trafficking rings to flourish. They ‘rent’ children from poor families, particularly in the centre of the country, promising to take care of their accommodation and employment. They tell the families the children will be trained and well looked after but the kids are usually put to work as cheap labour; selling flowers, cutting cloth and working in restaurants or as domestic servants. Sixteen-hour days, minimal wages and Dickensian accommodation are the norm.

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Filed under democracy, disease, drugs, economics, education, Vietnam

by | 11 September 2011 · 8:21 am

Rosa’s Route to Apostasy

From Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America, by Alma Guillermoprieto (Vintage, 2001), pp. 33-35:

[Rosa’s] family was well off by the standards of the provincial backwater she was brought up in, but her father, a devout Catholic, had strong sympathy for the labor movement. One of her first memories is of learning the songs of the Fifth Regiment of the Spanish Republican Army from activist priests who taught at her school. They told her about Dolores Ibarruri, “La Pasionaria,” the Basque miner’s daughter who during the Civil War exhorted the Republican troops to fight for liberty and face down death. Rosa was barely a teenager when she took to singing the Civil War hymns herself, to cheer on workers during strikes. At university, swept up in the radical fervor of the times, Rosa and her friends were soon helping campesino organizations coordinate invasions of privately owned ranches, set up roadblocks, and stockpile whatever weapons they could find for the coming revolution.

Although the FARC already existed, it was seen by many as old hat and insufficiently idealistic, and new guerrilla groups, and what used to be called “preparty formations,” multiplied. The Ejército de Liberación Nacional, or ELN, as well as the Quintín Lame, an armed Indian rights group; the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores; the M-19—all came into being. By the late seventies Rosa was closely identified with another of the groups to emerge from the university crucible, the Ejército Popular de Liberación, or EPL. The group was strong in the area of Cordoba, where in those days the population was fairly clearly divided between poor campesinos and the people with money who owned cattle ranches and farms where bananas and oil palms were grown.

How Rosa’s destiny took her from the EPL to the heart of paramilitary power is, in her telling, a long, breathtaking, and not always reliable story, but she is only one of many defectors from the fanatic left to join the ranks of the murderous right. The autodefensas claim that fully one-third of their troops are former guerrillas, and even if one disputes the figures, there is no doubting the general trend. Rosa’s life, however, is unusual even in Colombia, where reality always seems to flow out of someone’s dream, or nightmare.

The first thing that bothered Rosa about her leftist associates was what one might describe as their impact on the political ecology of the departamento of Córdoba. At the height of the revolutionary ferment, there were six different guerrilla organizations prowling around the hills in Rosa’s region, each one demanding that the campesinos pay “taxes” to finance their coming liberation. “If a campesino had five cows, he had to give up one,” Rosa says. “The guerrillas were eating up all the money from the NGOs [nongovernmental organizations]. They were hijacking mules. They were emptying out the community stores.”

None of these organizations, however, was capable of defending the campesinos when the ranchers—including many drug traffickers turned aspiring landed gentry—began organizing assassination squads to deal with guerrilla collaborators. “Those people were terrible masacradores,” Rosa says. “The rank and file were ranch guards, ranchers, drug traffickers, and everything you’ve heard about the [murders committed with] chainsaws, axes, and machetes is true.” Although the guerrillas could not defeat the paramilitary squads, they did rather well when it came to turning on each other. One guerrilla group, the ELN, tried to dispute the EPL’s local hegemony, Rosa recalls. “The ELN wanted to rule,” she says. “And they killed whoever didn’t obey.”

One day the campesinos decided they’d had enough of multiple taxes and the conflicting, deadly demands on their political loyalties. The first one to rebel was a fisherman who turned on an ELN patrol that had approached him for money. In Rosa’s description, the fisherman hacked a young man and a young woman guerrilla to death. “Campesinos don’t know how to kill,” Rosa observes dryly, having dwelt on the scene in some detail. “And when someone kills who doesn’t know how to do it, he kills monstrously.”

As for her own apostasy from the revolutionary cause, Rosa says it took place sometime after she was kidnapped in 1991 by one of the leaders of the antiguerrilla squads, the paramilitares. She had already decided by then that her commitment was to the campesinos and not the guerrillas, she says. Then came the kidnapping. She was abducted, she told me, after participating in a land invasion of a ranch owned by a well-known paramilitar. Her captors took her to a camp where “a fat man” was put in charge of torturing her to get information about the guerrillas. He broke off her teeth with pliers. (She paused in her narrative to show me that all her upper teeth had caps.) She was tied down while the fat man jumped on her stomach. She was forced to stand, bleeding, through the rest of the night, wondering when her execution would take place. At dawn, she was told to start walking. The bullet in the back she was expecting never came (“maybe because I never gave them the information they wanted, and they got tired of torturing me”). She kept walking and eventually found her way to her parents’ house.

The lesson she appears to have drawn from this episode is not what one would expect. “After that time,” Rosa explains, she and her kidnapper respected each other. “Me on this side, you on that one, we both agreed.” “It’s funny how life is,” she said, in conclusion to her narrative. “Because the guy who ordered the fat man to torture me and I are now pretty good friends.” Presumably, this is because a few months after her abduction she crossed over to her enemy’s side.

By then, Rosa says, a majority of the guerrilla group she was involved with, the EPL, had decided that a revolutionary war could not successfully be fought in Colombia, and had turned their weapons in, changing their organization’s name, but not its initials, to Esperanza, Paz y Libertad (Hope, Peace, and Liberty). Peace was not forthcoming, however, because the FARC guerrillas soon appeared with their own guns and tried to establish control in the void they perceived had been created by the despised pacifists. The FARC began executing former EPL guerrillas. The survivors and their campesino supporters felt they had no option except to join forces with the right-wing paramilitary leaders who had tortured Rosa and murdered many other comrades.

This dispatch was dated April 13, 2000.

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Filed under Colombia, drugs, economics, education, military, NGOs, war

by | 6 September 2007 · 6:23 pm

Authentic Mexican American Narcocorrido Polka

From True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx, by Sam Quinones (U. New Mexico Press, 2001), pp. 11-12:

His name was Chalino Sánchez. His singing career lasted just four years and he was killed when he was only thirty-one, yet he’s one of the most influential musical figures to emerge from Los Angeles or from Mexican music in decades. “When we were small, we always wanted to fit in, so we’d listen to rap. The other kids were all listening to rap, so I guess we felt that if we listened to Spanish music, we’d be beaners or something,” says Rodriguez. “But after Chalino died, everybody started listening to corridos. People want to feel more Mexican.”Six years after his death, Chalino Sanchez is a legend, an authentic folk hero. L.A.’s Mexican music scene and Mexican youth style were one way before Chalino Sanchez. They were another after him. After Chalino, guys whose second language was an English-accented Spanish could pump tuba- and accordion-based polkas out their car stereos at maximum volume and pretty girls would think they were cool.

Chalino renewed the Mexican corrido. In the Mexican badlands, where the barrel of a gun makes the law, for generations dating back to the mid-1800s the corrido recounted the worst, best, and bloodiest exploits of men. Corridos were the newspaper for an illiterate people in the days before telephones and television. Corrido heroes were revolutionaries and bandits—people who had done something worth singing about.

In Chalino’s hands, the corrido came to reflect the modern world. The corrido became the narcocorrido, the Mexican equivalent of gangster rap, with themes of drugs, violence, and police perfidy and an abiding admiration for the exploits of drug smugglers. And because of Chalino, Los Angeles, an American city, is now a center of redefinition for the most Mexican of musical idioms. Chalino democratized the genre, made it modern and American, and opened it to the masses. In Los Angeles almost anyone can have a corrido about him written, recorded, and sold. “In L.A., without exaggeration, 50 percent of the [Mexican] music that’s recorded here is based on the legacy he left,” says Angel Parra, the engineer who recorded most of his albums.

It boiled down to this, in the words of Abel Orozco, owner of El Parral nightclub in South Gate: “Chalino changed everything.”

Ever since I saw his interview with Ray Suarez on the NewsHour, I thought Quinones might turn into my new favorite writer on Mexican–American relations. My wife is reading his latest book, and I’m reading his earlier one, both of us enthusiastically.

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Filed under drugs, Mexico, music, U.S.

by | 21 January 2007 · 4:15 pm

How to End Another (Anti-)Opium War

I’ve been too busy with other projects lately to follow up on some news reports that relate to my recent excerpts from Rory Stewart’s travels in Afghanistan, in particular Anne Applebaum’s column last Tuesday advocating control rather than eradication of opium, the country’s largest cash crop by far.

Of course it isn’t fashionable right now to argue for any legal form of opiate cultivation. But look at the evidence. At the moment, Afghanistan’s opium exports account for somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of the country’s gross domestic product, depending on whose statistics you believe. The biggest producers are in the southern provinces where the Taliban is at its strongest, and no wonder: Every time a poppy field is destroyed, a poor person becomes poorer — and more likely to support the Taliban against the Western forces who wrecked his crops. Yet little changes: The amount of land dedicated to poppy production grew last year by more than 60 percent, as The Post reported last month….

Yet by far the most depressing aspect of the Afghan poppy crisis is that it exists at all — because it doesn’t have to. To see what I mean, look at the history of Turkey, where once upon a time the drug trade also threatened the country’s political and economic stability. Just like Afghanistan, Turkey had a long tradition of poppy cultivation. Just like Afghanistan, Turkey worried that poppy eradication could “bring down the government.” Just like Afghanistan, Turkey — this was the era of “Midnight Express“– was identified as the main source of the heroin sold in the West. Just like in Afghanistan, a ban was tried, and it failed.

As a result, in 1974 the Turks, with American and U.N. support, tried a different tactic. They began licensing poppy cultivation for the purpose of producing morphine, codeine and other legal opiates. Legal factories were built to replace the illegal ones. Farmers registered to grow poppies, and they paid taxes. You wouldn’t necessarily know this from the latest White House drug strategy report– which devotes several pages to Afghanistan but doesn’t mention Turkey — but the U.S. government still supports the Turkish program, even requiring U.S. drug companies to purchase 80 percent of what the legal documents euphemistically refer to as “narcotic raw materials” from the two traditional producers, Turkey and India.

Why not add Afghanistan to this list?

Registan contributor Joshua Foust notes an ominous sign that the U.S. seems to be taking the opposite approach.

President Bush has named William Wood as the new ambassador to Afghanistan…. Wood hails from Colombia, which makes sense. The theory must be that he has experience running an anti-narcotics effort. Of course, the anti-cocaine effort in Columbia is an abysmal failure, and repeating the same tactics in the anti-opium effort in Afghanistan look set to make the security problems—to say nothing of the drug problem—far, far worse.

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Filed under Afghanistan, drugs, Turkey, U.S.