BOSHE, a postage stamp of a village in eastern Guangdong Province, is not the type of place that would normally make headlines. But the town became famous Thursday, and for all the wrong reasons.

    Xinhua, China’s largest State-run news agency, reported that police arrested 182 suspects in a raid Dec. 29, including a man who had once been Boshe’s Communist Party chief, and seized about three tons of crystal methamphetamine, which is also called “ice” in China, in what the State media calls the largest and most successful drug bust in Guangdong’s history.

    But officials warned that the takedown of “Guangdong’s No. 1 Drug Village,” while symbolically significant, was just the beginning of the province’s anti-drug push.

    By all accounts, the Dec. 29 raid was massive: Over 3,000 police mobilized helicopters, motorboats, and police dogs to take down 77 drug-production sites, arresting scores of villagers and confiscating guns, knives and a homemade bomb. Three police were reported injured in the raid, but are in good condition. However, this wasn’t overkill for Boshe, the “most notorious” drug-manufacturing area under the aegis of Lufeng City, a municipality of about 1.1 million that provincial security official Guo Shaobo says produced more than one-third of China’s meth over the past three years.

    The use of methamphetamine is growing in China: A Nov. 23 U.N. report found that the share of amphetamine users among all Chinese drug users had “continuously increased” over the preceding five years, while the total amount of meth seized in China rose 13 percent from 2011 to 2012.

    According to the Southern Metropolis Daily, despite the village’s miniscule size — about 14,000 residents on 0.54 square kilometer — Boshe had defied previous attempts to rein in its drug operations, using human barricades of the elderly, women and children to counter police forces. More than 20 percent of the families in the village were involved in drug production and trafficking, according to Guo.

    Meanwhile, local cops, far from busting producers, allegedly protected the village industry. China Daily reports that Boshe officials also got in on the act, even village Party chief Cai Dongjia, known as the “biggest drug trafficker” in the region.

    Cai, Party chief and head of Boshe, used to be an icon for local drug traffickers, according to Guo, deputy director-general of Guangdong Provincial Department of Public Security. Cai was detained in Huizhou when police launched a special operation in the early hours of Dec. 29. Cai was also a deputy to Shanwei City People’s Congress and has intricate connections with local governments.

    According to Guo, Cai could always rescue, via bribing local Party and government officials, any drug traffickers who were detained by police in anti-drug operations over the past years.

    Qiu Wei, political commissar of drug enforcement with the Guangdong provincial department of public security, said villagers who were hoodwinked by Cai set up roadblocks and even attacked police officers who came to the village to fight drug and related crimes. Cai had equipped villagers with replica AK-47s, homemade bombs, knives and other weapons, and established lookout posts and checkpoints at the village’s major entrances to counter a police crackdown, Qiu said.

    To ensure the Dec. 29 operation was a success, Guo said all the police officers came from outside the area. And authorities wanted to avoid “protective umbrellas,” local authorities in support of the drug operations who secretly tip off the drug traffickers in advance, Guo said.

    According to Yang Zhiming, deputy mayor of Shanwei and director of the city’s public security bureau, a total of 14 “protective umbrellas,” including police station heads and village chiefs, were detained before the operation.

    A Thursday report in the widely read Chinese newspaper Legal Daily described how, by the time of the raid, waste from drug production had formed 2-meter-tall piles along Boshe’s streets, and most residents had begun using home generators because the local power network could no longer handle demand. Locals told Legal Daily that pollution from meth manufacturing had grown so bad that the lychee fruit for which the village was once known would no longer grow there.

    The strike against Boshe is part of “Operation Thunder,” which Guangdong authorities initiated in July 2013 in an effort to combat drug trafficking that originated there. So far, the operation has led to the arrest of 10,836 suspects and the seizure of almost nine tons of contraband. Despite these successes, Guo emphasized in a press conference that there was “still a lot of work to do.” The results of all raids to date, he told the Legal Daily, were merely “the tip of the iceberg.”

    China closed 122,000 drug-related cases in 2012 and captured 133,000 suspects, a nearly 20-percent increase year on year, according to a report by the National Narcotics Control Commission.

    Over 23 percent of criminals convicted of drug offences from January to May in 2013 were sentenced to above five years in prison, life imprisonment or the death penalty, according to Sun Jungong, spokesman of the Supreme People’s Court.

    Despite strengthened police campaigns and severe punishments, drug-related crimes are still rampant as dealers now have more diverse ways to manufacture drugs, especially meth. For instance, they extract ephedrine out of ephedra, a medical herb, to make meth.

    Several ephedra sellers reached by the Global Times said that ephedra is cheap, but the trade is under strict control by authorities.

    “The quickly evolving and relatively new drugs such as meth are a huge challenge for narcotics control, as relevant legislation and supervision are always lagging compared to the knowing of dealers and addicts,” said Liu Sa, an expert with the Beijing Education Base of Forbidding Narcotics and Hallucinogens, a government-funded group.

    Drug trafficking through the Internet and courier companies also made it harder to track suspects as dealers can easily hide their identity and disguise the contents from couriers. Liu also noted that a lack of participation of social groups and enterprises, and the shortage of professional education staff remain large challenges, as the general public still don’t consider drugs a pressing issue.

    (SD-Agencies)