Beijing extends compulsory drug rehab period to one year

Chinanews, Beijing, Feb. 8 – Starting from today, all entertainment venues once involved in drug deals in Beijing will be marked with a special sign. In these entertainment venues, Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau will apply a management system different from other entertainment venues to supervise their business activities, according to the Beijing News. In 2006, Beijing local police investigated and punished 38 entertainment venues involved in drug deals, with 345 drug addicts being found in these venues. 11 of the venues were ordered to close their business temporarily for rectification and 2 of them were banned from doing business. Although Beijing has cleared drug-related activities in all of its entertainment venues, Beijing police will apply even stricter measures this year to monitor drug activities in these places, said Fu Zhenghua, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau.Last month, the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau secretly sent an investigation team to check drug-related activities in many entertainment venues in Beijing and they hadn’t found any. However, they learned that a few entertainment venues were still involved in such activities by taking their visitors to somewhere else so that they could take drugs in places outside the venues. On February 4 and February 5, Beijing police cracked two big drug trafficking cases. Drug-related crimes were often accompanied with corruption, money laundering, gun crimes and gang crimes. Although Beijing police had made some achievement in cracking down drug-related crimes, such achievement was only temporary. When it is possible for such crimes to occur again, they would be even more severe than before, said Fu. In future, Beijing police will keep a record of all the drug addicts in the city. If local police find someone taking drugs for the first time,they will write down their names. If these people are found to take drugs again, local police will take compulsory measures to help them to break themselves of drug addiction, and the drug rehab period will be extended from six months in the past to one year. Before the 2008 Olympic Games are held in Beijing, local police might impose compulsory drug rehabilitation on all drug addicts in the city.