China's Smack Attack.(heroin)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)

In a tiny, darkened room on the outskirts of Beijing, Zhang Qiu watches his girlfriend inhale heroin smoke. She bends over a scrap of foil, holds a lighter underneath, then sucks in sharply as the whitish powder vaporizes. Zhang, 24, has already lost almost everything to the drug.

He came to Beijing five years ago from Shandong province, dreaming of becoming a rock musician. But after new friends introduced him to heroin, he quickly became addicted and eventually too weak to practice. A former girlfriend developed the habit, too, and jumped off a tall building. Now Zhang works in a bar, earning just enough to pay for the room and a minimum dose for himself and his new girlfriend Mimi. "I should be a man and stop her," he says, "but life is full of so many sorrows I can't stop taking it myself."

For China's young and restless, heroin is becoming a prominent source of sorrow. Like Zhang, many are drawn by promises of wealth and success to the country's booming megacities. (Like other addicts mentioned in this story, he asked that his real name not be used.) Uprooted and adrift, they often find more-fleeting pleasures instead. Among drug abusers in China--some three quarters of whom are under the age of 25-- 95 percent are addicted to heroin. Nationwide, law-enforcement officials estimate there could now be more than a million heroin addicts--a great number of them, according to sociologists and narcotics officials, among the 10 million migrants concentrated in large cities, where the drug is cheaper and more widely available than ever before. "Most of the people using heroin are migrant workers," says Qi Mengyuan, director of the Narcotics Division of the Public Security Bureau for southern China. "They are so far from home, and they use the drug to forget their problems."

Take Han Juan, a 19-year-old dancer from Sichuan. She left her home province last year to "see what she could achieve" in vibrant Guangdong. She was able to find work only singing in karaokes--and was pressured to "do other things," she says, refusing to elaborate. Finally, tired and defeated and homesick, she was told by an associate that she could "forget all her troubles" by taking a "white powder." Ignorant of its long-term effects, she tried it. "At first I felt nauseated, I wanted to vomit, then after a time I felt lightheaded, then slept. Then in the future, when I was tired, or felt bad, I would buy it." Three thick scars on each wrist show where she tried to commit suicide when a boyfriend tried to force her to stop.

Those seeking solace in heroin often find it has the opposite effect: it cuts them off even further from their families. Like most migrant workers in the south, 18-year-old Yi Xiangju, a frail, soft-spoken, shy young woman from Guizhou, sent most of her earnings home. But the long hours, sometimes 18-hour days, made her miserable. "My head hurt a lot, I had a lot of colds," she says. A friend introduced her to heroin, she soon became ...