SIDEBAR

• A Look at the 'White Killer'

Seven years ago, Kyin Mu Pu's husband got into an accident while driving a tractor and suffered liver damage, which left him tormented by sharp pains.

	Members of the Erkun anti-drug task force. Yin La Sau, the man on the left used to be a drug addict, but is now leader of the team. Photo by Ma Guihua, China Features

''Someone recommended 'Number 4' to him, saying it may kill the pain and diminish inflammation with certain anaesthetic effects, says Kyin Mu Pu, 'Number 4' being the term used for heroin in this village in Yingjiang county in the south-western province of Yunnan. It is located some 70 kilometres from the China-Burma border.

''He tried it. And he got addicted to it before he knew it,'' she recalls.

Later, her two teenage sons took using the drug while serving their father drinking water and cigarettes.

''They stole rice, fertiliser and seeds from home and traded them for Number 4. Anything worth some money somehow disappeared from the house,'' she says, because heroin was so easily available in the area.

''If you have ten yuan (1.2 dollars), you can get two pinches of No 4, enough to fill two caps of a penicillin bottle,'' she adds.

It came to the point when Kyin Mu Pu and a few other women could no longer sit back and watch their families being destroyed by drug use. They went to the village committee and applied to set up an organisation of their own against heroin.

It has been three years since an anti-drug task force was formally launched. It started with 37 women whose husbands' drug habits prompted them to join it, but now has grown to 57 members including six men, some of them former users.

''Women in the village are all eligible to join this organisation, so long as they agree to leave their fingerprints as a sign of approval,'' says Kyin Mu Pu, today an eloquent speaker.

At a village meeting held after the creation of the task force, the community agreed to adopt an anti-drug concord that spelled out fines for drug users, dealers and traffickers. It also empowered the 37 task force members to hand over traffickers to local police.

Drug users from outside the village would be fined and driven out if they are caught taking drugs, agreed the villagers of Erkun, whose 298 residents are the Jinpo ethnic group, known as Kachin across the border in Burma.

Erkun villagers taking or dealing in drugs outside the village shall also be fined and sent to police. Those who accommodate relatives or outsiders for drug abuse or dealing shall not be exempted from penalties.

Today, the women in the team say they have made a difference, adding that there are no longer drug users in the community. In the eighties and early nineties, the drug problem peaked when drugs from the 'Golden Triangle' easily entered the country as China opened its borders with Burma.

In 1991 to 1992, Erkun had drug addicts in almost every household, plus five to six households engaging in drug dealing, recalls Li Genxian, former chief of the village. The youngest drug abuser in the village then was only 12, he recalls.

Over the years, drug abuse spread to 838 of the 1,142 villages in Yingjiang county, which shares a 214.6-kilometre border with Burma.

The 37 women, divided into three groups, also shadowed drug abusers and dealers in the village over the years. ''Once, we followed one drug user for some 20 kilometres to a neighboring township,'' says Kyin Mu Pu. Some addicts had threatened to kill the team members or cursed them.

Kyin Mu Pu says, however, that it is not easy to turn people over to the police. For instance, she says she had a hard time handing over a couple from whom 17 grammes of drugs were seized.

''The wife was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment while the husband was sent for three years in a labour camp for drug abuse and trafficking. They have two innocent children, the boy eight, the girl 13,'' she recalls.

The team members visit the couple regularly, providing the children 500 yuan (60 U.S. dollars) in support each year. They negotiated for an exemption from school fees and help with the family's sugarcane fields. ''Penalty is not the sole method to save the sick souls,'' Kyin Mu Pu says.

Team members also help the addicted villagers undergoing rehabilitation with farm work. To prevent them from selling their fields for money to get drugs, a small proportion of their land is used for rehabilitation sessions, or leased to other villagers... The land is returned to them when they are off the drugs.

Persistence and patience by the task force as well as continued care for addicted relatives make a difference.

''My husband, the oldest drug abuser in the village who was so ill that the police didn't even bother to touch him, softened in his attitude out of respect for us women and cut the habit four months later,''says a proud Kyin Mu Pu.

At one point, her husband took to substituting 'No 4' with wine, but Kyin Mu Pu continued to buy eggs and brown sugar to supplement his nutrition. Now, her 52-year-old husband, who used to have to pause four or five times to walk a distance of 20 meters, can play basketball.

Kyin La Rung, 37, continued his habit even after his release from labour camp and prison. He leased land to fund his habit and beat his wife when she refused to get drugs for him. But in 2001, he was given an ultimatum by the anti-drug team, which included his wife, to stop the habit in 15 days.

''I didn't believe those women could make it at first. But seeing them, including my wife, patrolling every day, I felt I would be damned if I don't quit it,'' says the young man, who for eight months now has been a member of the task force.

Even though the team says there are no more drug users in this village, their patrols go on. ''We have to ensure that no more drugs come into the village,'' says Kyin Mu Pu.

Ma Guihua of China Features wrote this under the IPS-Rockeller media fellowship programme 'Our Mekong: A  Vision amid Globalisation.