VietNamNet Bridge – Rehabilitating drug addicts in the city are relapsing at an increasing rate and it’s getting more difficult to keep them under management, the city’s social evils branch said recently.

Drug addicts work in a brick producing enterprise in HCM City. Such enterprises help the city authorities better manage recovered addicts.

The number of addicts under management in the first five months of this year was more than 1,100, 45.5 per cent higher than the same period last year, City Social Evils Fighting and Prevention Branch vice head Le Van Quy said.

However, more than 1,500 drug addicts had dropped out of the city authority’s management programme because they had moved away from their area and failed to register in their new location, he said.

The Law on Residence made it easy for former addicts to leave their locality without informing the authority, branch head Nguyen Ngoc Thach said.

When they arrived in other localities, many did not register for non-permanent residence, thus it was impossible for authorities to keep them under management.

People’s Committee of District 8 chairman Nguyen Thanh Chung said that by January this year, more than 30 per cent of addicts in the district failed to return home after detoxification.

"This is concerning because these people are likely to relapse and commit crimes," Chung said.

Statistics revealed that 503 of some 1,900 people arrested for crimes in the area were drug addicts and of the 503, 100 were relapsing addicts.

Department of Investigative Police deputy director Hoang Van Vinh said failing to register a change of residence did not violate the law, but the "disappearance" of these addicts had social consequences.

Do Duc Dong, 31, of HCM City, a relapsing addict, said he carried out about 40 robberies in five months before he was arrested in May.

Relapsing addicts Huynh Thi Ngoc Quyen and Nguyen Vu, who met in a rehabilitation centre in Binh Phuoc province, could not even remember how many robberies they carried out.

Head of the investigation team dealing with criminals on drugs in Tan Binh district Phan Si Hoa said 26 of 86 addicts left their homes after returning from rehabilitation centres without informing the authorities.

The same situation was happening in Cau Kho ward of District 1 where authorities didn’t know the whereabouts of about 60 of 127 addicts.

"No one can say what has happened with them," Hoa said.

Social evils branch head Thach said each ward in the city had a team of volunteer social workers but there were only 322 staff in charge of social evils fighting and prevention with 1,200 volunteer social workers to manage 17,000 addicts in various stages of rehabilitation.

"We have limited number of staff and the salary is low, thus many have not been quite as enthusiastic in supervising and helping former addicts as they could have been," Thach said.

Statistics show 550 relapsing drug addicts had been found guilty of crimes since the beginning of the year.

The number of addicts relapsing in first half of this year was 1,900 compared to 2,000 in the whole of last year.

Thach said the situation should improve with a revision of the Law on Drugs Prevention and Fighting.

However, Hoang Van Vinh from the Department of Investigative Police on Social Order Crime said families and communities played the key role.

"We need to have an in-depth research on the issue which can come up with suggestions on how families can take the lead in dealing with former addicts," he said.

VietNamNet/Viet Nam News

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