Vietnam union bosses admit drug addiction not just bourgeois scourge
HANOI - Thirty percent of Vietnam's registered drug addicts are blue-collar workers, union bosses said Thursday in a frank admission
that narcotics are not the bourgeois scourge often depicted by communist ideologues here.
Of the 100,030 addicts registered to July last year, 30,000 of them were state sector employees, the deputy head of the
Vietnam Labour Confederation's (VLC) drugs and social evils department, Le Van Nhien, told the Gia Dinh va Xa Hoi (Family
and Society) newspaper.
A survey carried out by unions in drugs rehabilitation units across the country also found that 30 percent of addicts were trade
union members, the English-language Vietnam News reported.
By contrast students, regarded in most Western societies as a key risk group, formed just 1.6 percent of addicts, while farmers,
who form the huge majority of Vietnam's 78 million population, accounted for only 0.6 percent.
Alarmingly for travellers, the transport industry proved the "most notorious" sector for drug use, with 6,000 addicts uncovered
in the survey.
The coal industry came a distant second with some 300 addicts found.
Nhien said that the VLC had been working to persuade managers against automatically firing staff who were found to have a
drug problem.
"We have been directing those units to learn that state employees who become addicted to drugs for a first or second time
should be regarded as victims," he told the newspaper.
"Only if they return to the habit for a third or fourth time are managers entitled to sack them."
VLC deputy chairman Do Duc Ngo said the unions had also been urging employers and local authorities to help recovering
addicts find a job as employment often proved the most difficult part of their rehabilitation.
The ready availability of cheap heroin has fuelled a massive increase in addiction in Vietnam's big cities in recent years, greatly
complicating the government's fight against AIDS.
Despite the widespread use of the death penalty in a draconian campaign against trafficking, opium and its derivatives continue
to pour across the border from neighbouring Laos and the other poppy-growing Golden Triangle countries of Myanmar and
Thailand beyond.
Needle sharing among heroin users has so far been the main factor behind the spread of the AIDS virus here, the health ministry
says.
But growing heroin use among prostitutes has seen an alarming rise in sexual transmission, with infection rates among Ho Chi
Minh City prostitutes leaping to 15.9 percent in 1999 from just 3.1 percent the previous year.
Mounting official concern about the spread of AIDS has prompted a growing frankness about a raft of issues that were
previously regarded as bourgeois "social evils."
Last April the social affairs ministry made the shock admission that as many as 70 per cent of the men who use Vietnam's
myriad brothels were not decadent Westerners but communist party cadres and civil servants.
"Prostitution has developed in an alarming and fairly open manner in Vietnam since 1997 ... largely due to the lack of firmness
shown in punishing prostitutes' customers and particularly those who are party cadres or state officials," the head of the
ministry's social evils department, Nguyen Thi Hue, said in a frank newspaper interview.
Hue's 70 percent figure for the proportion of brothel-goers who are party or government officials was repeated by the Ho Chi
Minh City youth daily Tuoi Tre Thursday in its report on the trade union drugs survey.
Agence France Presse - March 22, 2001.
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