Assessing HIV/AIDS Initiatives in China - Center for Strategic and ...

Bates Gill 13
nongovernmental organizations attempting to implement HIV/AIDS programs targeting
the drug-using community.
The National Narcotics Commission has submitted draft legislation that is expected to
be promulgated in 2006. Key provisions in the new drug law reportedly will make drug
taking (not just possession) a crime, threatening to drive drug users further underground,
which makes them less accessible for public health interventions. 25
Beginning in late 2004, public security authorities launched a “strike-hard”
crackdown against drug use that has seriously undermined the environment for carrying
out harm-reduction activities. Interviews with international NGO implementers reveal
that there have been numerous police actions in the vicinity of harm-reduction sites
(drop-in centers) as a result of stepped-up activities by the police. Reportedly, as a result
of increased funds provided for HIV/AIDS, public security authorities in several
provinces have engaged in building new detention facilities and are now arresting drug
users in order to populate these newly built facilities. According to a limited-distribution
report by an international bilateral development agency, “The operation is being
implemented on different schedules in each of the provinces and is seen as ‘harm
reduction,’ in that it stops public drug use and therefore prevents users from ‘harming’
themselves. There are now over eighty of these detention centres in operation in Yunnan
with inmate numbers estimated at 30,000.” There are plans afoot in Yining, in far western
Xinjiang province, to build new detention centers to house up to 10,000 IDUs.
The resources being committed by the public security authorities to the recent
antidrug campaign is significant. Goals are high, including, unrealistically, the
incarceration of all of the nation’s drug users. Funding has gone not only to the
construction of new detention facilities, but large budgets are available to pay informants
who turn in drug users and drug dealers. Local-level security officials are committed to
the strike-hard campaign against drugs and are under direct instructions from Ministry of
Public Security headquarters in Beijing, which gives them very little leeway when
dealing with international or domestic NGOs carrying out harm-reduction activities.
Public security authorities also remain uninterested in actively cooperating with
international partners to work on rehabilitation or methadone treatment within the
detention and involuntary detoxification system. The investigators have noted only one or
two occasions during their visits in Hubei, Sichuan, Xinjiang, Yunnan, Shanghai, and
Beijing over the past three years where there were concrete and effective efforts
underway—beyond the usual rhetoric—to forge cooperative links between health
authorities and the public security apparatus in order to better combat HIV/AIDS.
International NGO implementers reported to the authors that peer-education and
outreach efforts have also suffered, partly because of increased police activities but also
reflecting the fundamental challenges faced by implementers dealing with drug users.
One drop-in center implementer reported that needle exchange visitors dropped from
2,000 to 200 per month, because IDUs were too afraid to visit the center as they would
likely be arrested a few blocks from the clinic. Another international NGO implementer
reported that several peer educators who go to neighborhoods with clean needles to
25 “China Drafts Antidrug Law,” Xinhuanet.com, July 14, 2005. See also, “Law to Make Drug Taking
Criminal,” China Daily (Beijing), June 23, 2005.