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Drug detoxification resumes in Ho Chi Minh City after one year suspension

Drug detoxification resumes in Ho Chi Minh City after one year suspension

Tuesday, December 09, 2014, 20:21 GMT+7

Drug addiction has never paused, but rehabilitation centers in Ho Chi Minh City were closed down for around a year due to accusations of human rights violations.

But the centers have resumed working in the past three days after the passage of a regulation clearly defining compulsory treatment and compulsory drug detoxification.

The centers were shut down as they had been denounced for making detoxification forceful. A pilot voluntary program for drug detoxification followed but was ineffective because most junkies dropped the program halfway through.

In addition, the majority of drug addiction cases in Vietnam are related to crimes and violations.

As many as 70 percent of snatching and robbery cases in the Southeast Asian country are linked to drug addicts and 80 percent of junkies have a low education level, according to Nguyen Thanh Tai – former deputy chairman of the People’s Committee of Ho Chi Minh City and chief of the drug detox project in the city.

The dilemma Vietnamese authorities have faced in the past year was selecting a management model for drug detoxification.

With these facts in place, detoxification has recently been specified as a health treatment, and thus health workers are allowed to administer compulsory treatment for addicts.

In the past three days, over 1,200 drug addicts have been admitted to rehabilitation centers in Ho Chi Minh City, which work 24 hours a day.

“We can receive junkies any time of the day to help them get over their fit of addiction,” said Nguyen Hoang Nghia, a staffer at the Binh Trieu rehab center.

An addict is given a health check and medicine to pause their rush first. It takes health staff two to three days to identify the depth of addiction of a junkie.

“Within the first two days of detoxification, addicts suffer much pain and are bound to bed since they have no drugs,” said Dr. Danh Thi Minh Ha, who is the deputy director of the center. “They often become more stable after three to four days.”

Some drugs may cause mental disorders, making it more difficult to identify the real situation of an addict, the doctor added.

So during the first days, addicts are looked after by doctors and guards to prevent them from hurting themselves.

After the health and mental situation of an addict becomes more stabilized after five days, rehabilitation centers will set up a profile and wait for the approval of a local court to decide what model of detoxification they must attend.

A female addict named Loan, 45, from District 4, gave a message to a health worker, “Please ask my family to bring my child here to visit me. I miss him.”

Loan admitted, “I got addicted to drugs in 1998, and have three children.

“I often held my youngest child to wander around the streets with me at midnight when I needed drugs.

“I love my children and want to stop using drugs to take care of them, but the narcotics led me to go everywhere to find money to stop my rush of addiction.

“I needed VND550,000 [US$26] a day for drugs.”

Loan said she had thought drugs were just like cigarettes and she could stop using them any time, but this was wrong because she could not get rid of it before being admitted to the center.

“In a fit of drug addiction, one must go if they can go and must buy drugs with all the money they have,” Loan said.

Another woman being treated at the Binh Trieu center kept on crying after days of treatment because, “I remember now that I have a child and a month ago, I left him in hospital when he was just two weeks old.

“I left him there to go out for drugs and wander around till now.”

She said she just hoped that her husband’s family came to take him home because her husband is also a junkie.

The couple was abandoned by their families over their failure to stop using drugs.

Other addicts who were taken to rehabilitation centers begged doctors to call their families and tell them not to desert them there.

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