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August 14, 2014

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Actor is latest celebrity to face drugs charge

Source: Agencies | August 14, 2014, Thursday | Print Edition

AN actor has become the latest celebrity to face charges in one of China’s toughest crackdowns on illegal drug use in two decades.

Gao Hu, 40, who had a minor role as a soldier in Zhang Yimou’s 2011 movie “The Flowers of War,” was detained by police for possession and use of marijuana and methamphetamine, Xinhua news agency reported.

Several celebrities have been detained on drug charges.

Illegal drug use has ballooned in China in recent decades, after being virtually eradicated following the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

In recent years, rising wealth has been accompanied by a growing popularity of methamphetamines and the party drugs ecstasy and ketamine.

They are often traded on social media forums and consumed in nightclubs, leading to periodic police crackdowns.

The number of officially registered addicts in China was 1.8 million at the end of 2011. That represents about 10 percent of the number of Americans who seek treatment for drug problems every year.

In June, police in Beijing said they had detained screenwriter and novelist Chen Wanning — pen name Ning Caishen — for possession of drugs in an apartment in the capital. He tested positive for methamphetamine, a stimulant, police said.

The same month, film director Zhang Yuan, who made the 2006 movie “Little Red Flowers,” which was set in post-revolutionary China, was detained for drug offenses at a Beijing railway station after he tried to evade a random drugs check, Beijing police said.

Both were given administrative detentions, which is a maximum of 15 days.

Pi Yijun, an anti-drug adviser to the Beijing government, said the crackdown is one of China’s biggest in two decades.

He said demand for methamphetamines has spiked among people under 35 and that they have become easy to obtain.

Police are relying heavily on informants to identify users, who are then targeted by officers in drug test sweeps, Pi said.

“But these new types of drug are making it more difficult for police to identify users, because when they come into a club, everybody can be suspicious, not just a few people. It would be too costly to test everyone. So they mainly rely on whistleblowers,” Pi said.

Courts sentenced 39,762 people for drug-related offenses in the first five months of this year, an increase of more than 25 percent from the same period of 2013, according to figures from the Supreme People’s Court.

Police said they detained Gao, who starred this year in the Hong Kong film “The Man from Macau,” along with three others and seized about 7 grams of marijuana and 1 gram of methamphetamine.

Liu Yuejin, director-general of the Public Security Ministry’s Narcotics Control Bureau, said last year that while most users of heroin and opium are farmers and unemployed people, the users of newer drugs such as meth and ketamine are from a more diverse background, including entrepreneurs, celebrities and sports stars.

“When it comes to new drugs, the momentum is growing,” he said.

Their use and sale is “on an upward trajectory,” he added.

Nation


 

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