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Strategies & Market Trends : HONG KONG -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom who wrote (2695)	2/24/1999 1:52:00 AM
From: hui zhou	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2951

BANGKOK, Thailand - The economic crisis that swept across Asia in 1997 has fueled a sharp increase in the use of amphetamines, further enriching drug lords who largely built their fortunes through heroin trafficking, AP reported, citing narcotics experts. China has become the largest smuggling gateway for heroin trafficked to the outside world from the so-called Golden Triangle, the rugged opium-growing region where the borders of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand converge. Citing a report by the U.N.-financed International Narcotics Control Board, the experts said the economic boom that swept across East Asia in the mid-1990s -- and the subsequent economic collapse in 1997 -- helped fuel drug abuse. Economic conditions weakened traditional Asian family structures and put more stress on individuals, creating the conditions for greater drug abuse, the experts said. For example, during the boom, children were left alone more often as their parents went out after big-money jobs. Lacking supervision, many children succumbed to peer pressure and started to take drugs, the experts said. The boom also created more wealth, which enabled people to buy drugs. Amphetamines have become the most widely abused drug in Asia and are increasingly produced by drug lords who are supported by ethnic minority armies in Myanmar as an easier-to-make sideline to their opium and heroin businesses. Sorasit Sangpresert, deputy secretary-general of the Thai Office of the Narcotics Control Board, said amphetamine addicts doubled from 250,000 in 1995 to 500,000 last year in Thailand. Some experts put the figure at closer to 1 million of Thailand's 60 million people, and say users range from unsupervised schoolchildren to laborers who use the stimulant to work longer hours for overtime pay. Along with amphetamines, drug lords are also peddling heroin into tribal areas in the Triangle -- where opium is traditionally smoked -- and creating an army of addicts using needles for the first time, increasing the cases of AIDS. Injecting heroin has also become rampant in Myanmar, also known as Burma, and in southern China's Yunnan province, which has supplanted Thailand as the preferred route for smugglers taking heroin out of the Triangle to reach world markets. ''Today, 85 percent of all heroin seized in Southeast Asia is seized in China,'' said Christian Kornevall, regional representative of the U.N. Drug Control Program.