This was originally published on our new site, ChinaHB.
Human Rights Watch published a report on the poor state of Drug Rehabilitation in China. According to the HRW press release,
” Chinese authorities are incarcerating drug users in compulsory drug detention centers that deny them access to treatment for drug dependency and put them at risk of physical abuse and unpaid forced labor, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today. Half a million people are confined within compulsory drug detention centers in China at any given time, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS)…Abuses have led to the death of detainees in some cases, according to former detainees interviewed by Human Rights Watch. The law also adds an undefined “community-based rehabilitation” period of up to four years, effectively permitting incarceration without trial for up to seven years.
…Although the implementation of the Anti-Drug Law ended the practice of sentencing suspected drug users to Re-Education Through Labor (RTL), the Anti-Drug Law expands the sentence in a compulsory drug detention center to a minimum of two years, up from the previously mandated six to twelve month sentence. These drug detention centers permit the same abuses of unpaid forced labor, physical abuse, and the denial of basic health care common under the RTL system.”
Damjan’s Notes:
1) HRW report states that the drug rehabilitation centers are nothing more than business ventures for local police, and that the harsh treatment of those who go through the rehabilitation centers does almost nothing to cure use, 98% relapse. It is important to remember that drug rehabilitation centers in the United States have often been accused of low success rates, and available statistics are notoriously shaky due to the fact that they are self reported, and many leave out people who drop out of the program early. Some US centers have even been accused of being dressed up legal drug shops, weaning addicts of street drugs by substituting a prescribed regiment of legal alternatives. Perhaps the most reliable statistic to base a comparison on is that around 90% of alcoholics that go through some sort of program, relapse at some point. In short, all drug rehabilitation systems have the potential to be exploitative and China’s is no exception.
2) A better focus for the report would have been to focus on the fact that the centers are being run by China’s criminal justice system. This is particularly tragic since the criminal justice system, in theory, is positioned to best understand the plight of drug addicts. Like, for example, the fact that drug addicts are statistically destined to relapse, and that they need a fair amount of forgiveness. To that end, the two year mandatory sentence requirement is absolutely preposterous.
3) The New York Times and HRW report both seem to have caught on to the idea that people are accidentally taking drugs and then getting sent to these camps (NY Times article here). Accidentally taking drugs is really difficult, and the idea that somebody accidentally smoked a meth cigarette (as reported in NYTimes) is too far fetched to make sense. Would you lie if you were about to be sent away for two years? I would.
4) The New York Times also rightly points out that the drug rehabilitation centers described in the report are all based in one province and are not necessarily representative of the rest of China.
“Yu Jingtao, whose organization, Beijing Harm Reduction Group, distributes 30,000 clean needles a month, said the government was slowly moving toward the drug treatment model common in much of the developed world. ‘We’re just caught in a transition period,”’said Mr. Yu, himself a recovering addict. ‘Transition periods are never very pretty.’”
5) Why do human rights reports always opt for incendiary titles? This one is called “Where Darkness Knows No Limits: Incarceration, Ill-Treatment and Forced Labor as Drug Rehabilitation in China”. The title both summarizes the content and tells the reader what they should feel after reading the report. After that, only people who agree with the title or those who are strongly opposed are going to read it. Everyone else will probably click over to something else. This is why most people stop working for human rights groups after the first two years of college.
China Healthcare Blog
2 Comments
Nice Article Bringing to light what is happening in China. The Human rights organization should do something after all they are human too.
Agreed, I just don’t know how much they can do. China is increasingly demonstrating that it does not care to hold itself accountable to international laws, which it views with suspicion. There’s a great post by China Law Blog on this issue – http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/01/with_chinas_new_standing_come.html
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