SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST SEPT 1ST '73
Drug supply
squeeze
hits addicts
•VED IN
21
NICK 1913
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Hongkong's 80,000 addicts are facing a supplies squeeze 50 serious that the Government is considering a crash expansion programme of treatment centres for drug victims.
The squeeze on narcotics supplies has been accompanied by steep price increases. In some cases costs of smuggled heroin consignments to Hongkong have risen 200 per cent.
Retail drugs prices are shooting so far out of reach of the ordinary addict, officials feel, that many may try to kick the habit and seek a cure.
The sudden flood of potential new patients would impose an intolerable strain on Hongkong's already over stretched treatment services.
Last night it was learned that administrators: are considering plans for increasing treatment · facilities.
One other crisis factor is worrying officials: the prospect of a crime wave as addicts driven to desperation by the drugs prices seek the means of financing their habit.
"There is no evidence of this happening as yet," one source said last night. "But the danger cannot be ruled out of an addict's craving leading hun into crime because of the narcotics shortage driving prices up beyond his pocket.”
Yesterday some alarming facts and figures on the latest price ceiling hit by the narcotics ? spiral came into the hands of the S.C.M. Post:
• Pure. “No 4" heroin - the highest grade on the underworld market rose in two months from between $4,000 and $6,000 to a staggering $15,000 per pound by the end of July.
♦ Poorer grade. "No 3" heroin
the type usually smoked locally shot from $200 to $320 an ounce over the same period.
• Raw opium increased from $33 to $48 a tacl.
Barbitone, the substance mixed with heroin to dilute and make it smokable, went up from $120 to $250 a pound and similar base powder substances shot up in price from a previous low of $80 to $300 per pound.
Signs of the growing panic among the victims of Hongkong's twilight world of drugs are alrendy showing. There has been an increase in addicts seeking admission to the methadone maintenance programme, the drugs substitution therapy scheme which aims at weening drug addicts away from hard narcotics by treating them with the additive. but harmless, synthetic compound,
"The increased strain On Hongkong's treatment services is reflected by the fact that in a twin city with an estimated 80,000 drug users, there are only 1,700 treatment places for users: 600 each at Tai Lam Chung and Lantao's Ma Po Ping centres and a further 500 "voluntary" places at the Shek Kwu Chau Centre run by the Society for the Aid and Rehabilitation of Drug Addicts (SARDA).
The strangle hold squeeze on narcotics supplies to Hongkong stems from two fundamental factors:
• The increasingly effective crackdown by narcotics agencies here on the drug dens and opium manufacturing and Storage centres.
The WRI against the production of drugs in the Burmese Thai Laotian border "Golden Traingle," the world's richest hard drugs source.
Drug running to Hongkong was also heavily hit by several major losses at sea of smuggled consignments this year.
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