China’s drugs crackdown targets stars

Zhang Yuan was detained earlier this year. Picture: Getty

The announcement came after actor Gao Hu became the latest Chinese celebrity detained in one of China’s sternest crackdowns on illegal drug use in two decades.

Mr Gao, 40, who had a small part as a soldier in Zhang Yimou’s 2011 movie The Flowers of War, was detained by police for alleged possession and use of marijuana and methamphetamine, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Beijing police also announced he had been detained on Tuesday.

Several celebrities have been detained on drug charges following a declaration in June by the president, Xi Jinping, that illegal drugs should be wiped out and that offenders would be severely punished.

The Beijing Times reported that 42 Beijing performing arts associations and theatre companies signed a pledge on Wednesday not to hire any artists that had used drugs, aiming to “purify” the performing arts. It said the signing was organised by the capital’s Narcotics Control Office and Beijing Cultural Bureau.

Illegal drug use has ballooned in China in recent decades, after being virtually eradicated following the 1949 Communist revolution. Narcotics began to reappear with the loosening of social controls in the late 1980s.

In more recent years, rising wealth and greater personal freedoms have been accompanied by a growing popularity of meth and the party drugs Ecstasy and ketamine. They are often bought on social media forums and consumed in nightclubs, prompting to periodic police raids.

The number of officially registered drug addicts in China was 1.8 million at the end of 2011. That is about one-tenth the number of Americans seeking treatment for drug problems each year.

In June, Beijing police said they detained screenwriter and novelist Chen Wanning, whose pen name is Ning Caishen, for alleged possession of drugs in an apartment in Beijing. He tested positive for meth, they claimed.

That same month, film director Zhang Yuan, who made the 2006 film Little Red Flowers set in post-revolutionary China, was detained for alleged drug offences at a Beijing railway station after he tried to evade a random drug check, according to a report on the Beijing police’s micro blog.

Both received administrative detention, which is a maximum of 15 days.

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

He said demand for meth has spiked for people aged under 35, and that it has become easy to obtain. Mr Pi said police were relying heavily on informants to identify users, who were then targeted by officers in drug test sweeps.

A total of 39,762 people were sentenced for drug-related offences in the first five months of 2014, up more than a quarter from the previous year, according to the Supreme People’s Court.

Police said they detained Gao, who starred this year in the Hong Kong film The Man from Macao, along with three others and seized about seven grams of marijuana and one gram of meth.

China is taking action on the production and export of source chemicals used to make meth in Mexico, destined for the United States, but the illicit diversion and smuggling of the drugs through Asia remains rife.