Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2001. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2001. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Reuters NewMedia - Tuesday December 4, 2001
Officials in the southern coastal town of Nha Trang said 19 addicts broke out of a center there last Wednesday, using homemade saws to cut through barred windows and breaking down doors and walls.
Le Tan Danh, deputy head of the Labour Department in Nha Trang, told Reuters ten of the fugitives had been recaptured.
The incident happened after 188 drug addicts escaped from another rehabilitation center in Can Tho, a southern province of Vietnam on November 16.
A foreign health consultant said the breakouts came amid a campaign to send more drugs users for rehabilitation at what were essentially detention centers offering little in the way of counseling or medication.
Danh said the addicts who had broken out were new arrivals.
"They were still craving drugs as their treatment has not gone on long enough. There are more than 100 people treated in the center, and the rest, the old ones, are not so irritable."
He said addicts were generally obliged to spend a year in the center, having been judged social nuisances by the local office of the Labour Ministry's Anti-Social Evils Department.
According to ministry figures, Vietnam has more than 130,000 drug addicts, most of them heroin users. Injecting of heroin has caused surges in HIV infections in urban areas in recent years.
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