by Vu Kim Chung
7-1-2000
Street children are being increasingly exploited by drug syndicates in Vietnam as couriers and dealers. Accounts in several state newspapers in early January 2000 said children as young as 12 had been caught dealing heroin in Ho Chi Minh City, where they sold up to 10 hits of the drug a day in return for basic food and shelter. The reports were verified by sources working with international drug agencies in Vietnam, which is battling widespread domestic heroin abuse and has been identified by the United Nations as an increasingly important transit country in the international drug trade.
In what one observer suggested was an indication of Vietnam's rapidly disintegrating social cohesion, official statistics reveal that more than 12,000 children are now fending for themselves on the streets of the country's two major cities. That figure represents an increase of 50 percent since 1998 and, according to a report in the Ho Chi Minh City Youth newspaper, most of the 1,218 juvenile drug dealers brought before the courts in the southern metropolis in 1998 were homeless children.
Foreign police officers working with Vietnamese authorities report the phenomenon is now also appearing in the capital, where until recently the country's severe communist leadership had managed to contain the spread of what it calls "social evils".
"Large numbers of street children are now selling heroin," one foreign officer said. "They are not the big distributors, but we are seeing postcard sellers and shoeshine boys dealing both as freelancers and as part of organised gangs."