Howdy, everyone!!! Well, I've been in China for two weeks and didn't get to really party until last night. Finally got a solid feel of the illicit drug market in this area. I'm currently in my hometown of Zhongshan, located in the southeast province of Guangdong, which is the only part of the country where Cantonese (instead of Mandarin) is the primary language. Let me say in advance that everything I report pertains to what's happening in Zhongshan. China is huge and has tons of people, as most of you probably know. So the drug & music scenes outside of my hometown may be quite different.

Anyway, my cousins, their friends, and I hit up one of the major clubs downtown. Inside, the DJs were playing what I would best describe as hard trance energy remixes of Chinese pop songs. The only music more popular than this are the original versions of those pop songs. If you go shopping, you would hear one or the other being played at any given store. Among Zhongshan youths, dance music is far more mainstream than rock or hip hop.

I had been at this club and others during previous returns to
Zhongshan, but never really did any blackmarket research before. There are no age restrictions, ID checks, admission fees, or even security pat-downs at the door. The catch is that as soon as you walk in, waitresses sit your party down at a table where you must order a round of beer. Funny, I never asked why, but they never offer any other kind of alcohol. And I'm not sure if patrons can walk up to the bar to order their own drinks. In any case, it seems that beer is the only
form of alcohol served and the only way these venues make $$. One does not have to be a certain age to purchase booze either, though I didn't get any sense that this has caused any problems around youth drinking. However, this business of beer at these clubs creates a much higher rate of poly-drug/alcohol use than what I've noticed in California.

The Chinese slang term for ecstasy literally means "head-shaking pill." So what you'd find at a club is a lot of people shaking their heads. I don't know if this dance style inspired the slang term, or the other way around. The point is that this is an easy way of figuring out who's rolling. Not that this is the best way to measure the rate of substance use at a party, but roughly ten percent of everyone inside were doing that dance, in addition to having that e-tarded look that I've seen on so many faces before, including my own, hehehe. Well, a lot of people who would have been on e really had no choice but to just shake their head, granted that the dance floor was relatively small. The majority of the space was filled with tables. Plus on the side, there are karaoke rooms that are rented out for the night. You and your friends can sing, or you can switch the TV to live footage & music from the dance floor. It's like having your own private rave. So I'm not surprised when folks tell me that the most drug use occurs in the karaoke rooms.

I told my cousin to score whatever he could for me. When his friend arrived, he got a pill, three joints, and a bag of k. I had picked up another pill at his house a week earlier. One is white with a V and the other tan with a C. I'm currently debating if I should spend $200+ to submit these tablets to EcstasyData.org for adulterant testing. But primarily, I wanted to see how easy it would be to get drugs inside
these clubs, and it was quite a piece of cake. Security didn't seem to give a shit about anything. The dealers were making transactions with their customers outside the restrooms with staff walking right past them. My cousin even told me I could smoke the joints out in the open. He also said that instead of smoking it orally, marijuana users inhale it nasally. In other words, snorting the joint? That was the weirdest thing I'd ever tried. The joints were also as thin as toothpicks, literally. If this is the kind of herb that's available in the area, no wonder marijuana is not the most widely used illicit substance like it is in the U.S. In Zhongshan, cocaine, e, and k all seem to be more popular than weed.

The preferred substance to smoke, for many Chinese by the way, is tobacco. Cigarette smoking is far more prevalent and socially accepted in China than in America. Teenagers start at an average of an earlier age and adults puff right in front of children, which means even babies second-hand smoke. Fuking sucks.

Anyway, back to the illegal drugs again, which I spent about 450 yen on. One U.S. dollar equals about 7.5 yen. The average Chinese income is lower than the average American one, but so is the average cost of living. 100 yen can buy you nearly two days' worth of meals at a standard restaurant. 150 yen bought us a round of probably fifteen bottles of Calsberg at our table. A single e pill, however, ran 100 yen. So if you ever take a vacation in Zhongshan, know that shopping,
dining, housing, and commuting will all be very cheap for your
American ass. But if you wanna do drugs, get ready to exchange some serious currency. Shit, just my luck, hahaha!!!

All joking aside, China has one of the largest drug-related health crises in the world right now. The rate of drug addiction and HIV infection among syringe users has been climbing rapidly for years. This is probably one of the reasons that the cocaine scene is somewhat isolated from the other drug scenes. My cousin who had the hook-ups at the club referred me to my other cousin for coke, but that other cousin recommended against trying to find blow cuz of the heightened risks of getting caught with it. He also said that nowadays, users are sticking to e and k cuz these drugs don't have the same addiction potential that everyone has witnessed with coke, and probably heroin and speed too, though I don't hear much about them in Zhongshan.

The health problem has grown so large that official discussions for needle exchange are actually taking place, despite how repressively anti-drug the government has always been. My cousin said that capital punishment is the sentence for being caught with a kilo+ of any illegal substance. Different sources estimate that drug dealers are
executed on a daily basis in China. On at least one occassion, China has held an anti-drug summit where criminals were lined up in front of a crowd for display before being sent to the firing squad. With these type of policies being carried out, one would think that no one in his right mind would sell drugs. That my cousins and I were able to walk into the club and openly score what we did in a few hours lends much weight against the criminal injustice system known as our drug war.

To top it all off, there is practically no drug education or harm
reduction in Zhongshan. I saw a random ass commercial showing shots of patients exercising at a rehab cut with scenic shots of China. The voice-over was in Mandarin, which I don't understand, but my cousin said that they're just telling the viewer not to do drugs. If this is the only information being distributed around illegal substances, then no wonder there's a public health crisis. If DanceSafe can ever get the funding to translate its literature into Chinese, I would definitely spearhead the project. But even my contact in Hong Kong
says that our information isn't anti-drug enough to garner support from their government, which funds the outreach agencies there, so in the mainland, it would be even more impossible. But like I said, needle exchange may take place in China in the future, and since needle exchange is one of the major harm reduction services that inspired the founding of DanceSafe, the situation may not be all that impossible after all...