The trafficking and sale of narcotics in China, especially heroin and ecstasy, have quickly developed into a battle for the government, according to the country’s drug enforcement body.
As China’s market economy has developed a global reach, the country has also become home to a sophisticated underground economy of drug manufacturing, cross-border trafficking and addiction, the National Narcotics Control Commission said this week.
Police seizures of heroin were up 13.6 per cent last year to 10.8 tons, the second straight year of increase. Seizures of ecstasy rose about eightfold last year to 3m pills. And the quantity of chemicals used to make drugs discovered by authorities more than doubled.