We need to learn more about this common enemy

It was heartbreaking when I saw a mother of four crying her eyes out after being arrested by officers of the National Immigration Administration in Yunnan province.

In 2007, the woman had been sentenced to 15 years in prison for smuggling heroin to a city in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region, but she was pregnant, so her jail term was postponed. She decided to flee overseas.

After giving birth, she and her family moved back to her hometown in Yunnan, but life was tough.

As a registered fugitive from justice, she could not find work, so her family lived on the money she made doing odd jobs.

Later, an electronic platform alerted police to her presence, and she was detained three weeks ago.

I watched her interrogation with mixed feelings: I knew she was a criminal and that she had to pay for the things she had done, but I felt bad when I thought about her children.

Drugs such as heroin and methamphetamine are endangering society and tearing families apart, like that of the woman I had met.

When I saw statistics showing that narcotics are still being trafficked and most addicts begin using again after compulsory detoxification, I felt that I needed to learn more about this evil trade.

One of the immigration officers I met in Yunnan told me that few seniors have any understanding of the harm caused by such drugs and some even try them simply out of curiosity.

He added the situation is changing among young people as they have a better level of education.

However, regular drug users have even more knowledge — not only about the harmful effects, but also about the science of how narcotics affect the body.

Meanwhile, many of the people I met who had never tried drugs said they knew that they were bad. When I asked how, they didn’t know.

People often associate drug addiction with poverty. I think that is a reasonable assumption.

Despite that, I also heard stories about how well-off, well-educated residents of China’s megacities are becoming addicted, but many have already bid farewell to hard drugs such as heroin in favor of new increasingly popular synthetic highs.

We need to make more efforts to deal with this issue. We cannot “just say no”; we need to understand more about why and how these drugs affect our bodies and reject them rationally.

The starting date of China’s modern history is signaled by the Opium Wars (1840-42 and 1856-60), and our collective memory of those events reinforces our zero-tolerance attitude toward illegal drugs.

I know we are going to wage a long war against narcotics, and I believe the authorities will make more practical and effective moves to win the battle.