“Our company has delivery stations in every part of China,” boasts one Chinese-language Web site, with photos of illegal narcotics it sells. “We offer 24-hour delivery service to your door, and we have long-term and consistent supplies. If you just make one phone call, we’ll deliver to your hands in one to five hours.”

Another Chinese Web site offers meth wholesale for $19,700 a kilo, or deliveries to your door of smaller quantities in hundreds of cities around China. Even in remote Anhui Province, it delivers drugs in 21 different cities.

All this is completely illegal in China, where narcotics traffickers are routinely executed. But it doesn’t seem to be a top government priority, because these Web sites aren’t even closed down or blocked. Tens of thousands of censors delete references to human rights, but they ignore countless Chinese Web sites peddling drugs, guns or prostitutes.

Doesn’t it seem odd that China blocks Facebook, YouTube and The New York Times but shrugs at, say, guns?

Meanwhile, for Motherboard, Eveline Chao reports on the growing problem of methamphetamine production and use in China. As portrayed by the popular U.S. television show “Breaking Bad,” Mexico is the source of most of the meth in the U.S. But China is increasingly responsible for providing the chemicals that are used in the making of the drug:

Records of large drug busts involving meth in recent years–an increasingly common occurrence–tend to show a trail that leads back to China. Last January, the Mexican navy announced that a single bust had yielded 195 tons of meth chemicals in a Chinese shipment, following a six-week period that netted an additional 900 tons of precursor chemicals. In April, three tons of methylamine chloride, a chemical used in pharmaceuticals and pesticides, was found at LAX in a shipment from China; it was on its way to Mexico, where it was bound to be cooked into $40 million of methamphetamine for American consumers. The list gets longer.

American officials now estimate that 80 percent of the meth consumed in the US is Mexican-made–with ingredients from China. “The rising threat of new synthetic drugs requires a truly international response, and we look forward to extending our cooperative work with China to address the dangers that these substances pose to the citizens of both our countries,” Berit Hallberg, a spokesman for the White House’s drug czar, said in a statement to Stars and Stripes. James Rendon, the Coast Guard Rear Admiral in charge of the DoD’s Joint Interagency Task Force West, described the meth-from-China problem more simply: “It is a big problem, and it is getting bigger.”

In China–where crystal meth is generally called 冰 bing, or ice, and “doing meth” is called 溜冰 liu bing, or “ice skating”–the meth picture is a mirror image of that of the US. Both are large countries pocked with wide-open spaces that are ideal for homemade recipes of the smelly, noxious, explosive stuff. Whether you’re in Indiana or Shanxi, it’s in these rural spaces where meth consumption is most rampant, not least because it’s cheap and offers a lot of bang for your buck–users report a high that, unlike coke, lasts for hours.

Last week, NBC News reported on a drug bust in China which found almost 200 pounds of methamphetamines:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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In the Report “A memory retrieval-extinction procedure to prevent drug craving and relapse” (13 April, p. 241), Y.-X. Xueet al. describe experiments conducted on rats and drug users in Beijing, China. Although the authors state that the study participants gave written informed consent and that the research was approved by the Human Investigation Committee of the Peking University Health Center, substantial questions about ethical protections remain.

The authors do not mention that the Beijing Ankang Hospital and Tian-Tang-He Drug Rehabilitation Center, where their study participants reside, are compulsory treatment centers run by the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau and the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Justice (respectively), historically housing people detained without due process. Over the past few years, Chinese compulsory treatment centers have also begun accepting voluntary patients. The specific dates on which the research was conducted and whether the study participants in Xue et al.‘s paper were voluntary patients or held under administrative detention are not clear from the Report, nor is the standard of drug dependency treatment provided in either center.

[...]

But the Chinese can’t take all the blame: It turns out that U.S. taxpayers were also inadvertently supporting this work. Two of the co-authors on the original paper were scientists at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which is congressionally funded. In response to voicemails left at the offices of all five of NIDA’s media relations’ spokesmen, I received the following two-sentence email: “Good afternoon. In response to your voicemail, the study you referred to was not funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.”

Unfortunately, that’s not the whole truth. In a statement released to the Associated Press on April 22, NIDA explained that its scientists “advised on the experimental design of the preclinical studies, and were involved in the data analyses and in the preparation of the manuscript.” While NIDA didn’t provide direct funding for the study, they did contribute financial support for the paper by paying the salaries of David Epstein and Yavin Shaham, who provided technical assistance and whose names are on the published paper. NIDA’s claim that their only support was technical, though, would be in violation ofScience magazine’s guidelines — which state that all co-authors are responsible for the sum total of any article published in its pages — their own code of conduct, and standard scientific protocol. By allowing their names to be published on the study, NIDA’s scientists took responsibility for the entire contents of the article, including the ethics of the research.

Sadly, this is not the first such study supported by NIDA in Southeastern Asia with questionable rights abuses; it appears to be an ongoing, and under-reported problem. In 2011, Human Rights Watch reportedthat compulsory detention centers in Vietnam, where other NIDA studies were conducted, were engaged in similar kinds of arbitrary detention and forced labor.

In the study, the Beijing scientists tested a technique called “memory retrieval-extinction” to prevent drug cravings in heroin users. Other research had shown that presenting addicts with a reminder of their addiction, such as the sight of a crack pipe, without letting them experience the drug’s effects can make the cue less likely to trigger craving. But that effect fades within weeks or even days.

The study concluded that the technique works longer, up to six months, if the addict’s memories of the drug are first triggered (“retrieved,” via a five-minute video about the drug) before the link between the reminder and the drug is “extinguished.”

The scientists concluded that memory retrieval-extinction offers “a promising nonpharmacological method” for fighting addiction.

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In March, police in the cities of Lanzhou and Xi’an in west China found some people were getting and selling drugs through chatting in online chatting room, which were usually inaccessible to outsiders.

New comers could only be allowed to enter the online chatting room after being introduced by “acquaintances” and performing drug-addiction through the online video, Liu said.

The MPS soon launched a nationwide battle to fight against online drug-related activities on Aug. 31, and started tightening the net to seize the suspects on Sept. 2.

Among the 12,125 arrested suspects, 66.2 percent are young people under 35 years old, and 2.6 percent are under 18, with the youngest being 14 years old, according to Liu.

China’s war against drugs also recently cut off a well-connected trafficking ring based in Guangxi and yielded the largest-ever drug bust in Hong Kong’s history.

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Fu Lixin, emotionally exhausted from caring for her sick mother, needed a little pick-me-up. A friend offered her a “special cigarette” — one laced with methamphetamine — and Ms. Fu happily inhaled.

The next day, three policemen showed up at her door.

“They asked me to urinate in a cup,” she said. “My friend had been arrested and turned me in. It was a drug test. I failed on the spot.”

Although she said it was her first time smoking meth, Ms. Fu, 41, was promptly sent to one of China’s compulsory drug rehabilitation centers. The minimum stay is two years, and life is an unremitting gantlet of physical abuse and forced labor without any drug treatment, according to former inmates and substance abuse professionals.

“It was a hell I’m still trying to recover from,” she said.

From AFP, some notes on the impact of the Anti-Drug Law on rehabilitation centers:

Amid rising drug use in recent years, China passed the [Anti-Drug] law in a bid to standardise its system of drug detention and rehabilitation centres, raising hope of a new climate in which users would be treated as patients, not inmates.

But Human Rights Watch said the system is still run by police, not health care professionals.

It added that the law had actually expanded the power of police to arbitrarily detain individuals without a reasonable suspicion of drug use and force them to take urine tests.

It also increased the minimum sentence to a compulsory drug detention centre from between six and 12 months to between two and three years.

“In the name of treatment, many suspected drug users are confined under horrific conditions, subject to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and forced to engage in unpaid labor,” the report said.

Human Rights Watch’s PDF report, “Where Darkness Knows No Limits,” can be read online. From the introduction:

In our 2008 report, Human Rights Watch documented what former detainees described as
an “unbreakable cycle” of incarceration, unbearable stigmatization when released back into
the community, unemployment, discrimination, poor health, and finally, in hopelessness, a
return to drug use. Our current research found that this endless cycle continues. While the
Anti-Drug Law purports to make the reintegration of drug users into society a priority,
policies alerting the police when a former detainee checks into a hotel, applies for a job or
registers for harm reduction services reinforces the overwhelming stigma they already face.

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Drugs and drug-related crime in China are still a blot on the Chinese landscape despite a people’s war waged against it a year ago.

In the first four months of the year, China arrested 19,000 people responsible for 24,000 drug-related criminal cases, said a senior official with the office of the National Narcotics Control Commission in Beijing yesterday.

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