Hong Kong drug addicts head to China to pop pills

By Tan Ee Lyn

HONG KONG (Reuters) - The ease of travel to the China mainland since Hong Kong's handover in 1997 has drawn the city's young people to a cheap and convenient playground just across the border in Shenzhen city.

Every weekend, young people pour into Shenzhen in China's southern Guangdong province to devour cheap food, entertainment -- and illicit party drugs.

Street drugs of all types -- cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, ketamine and methamphetamine -- are more easily available and cheaper in discotheques in southern China than in Hong Kong.

"At first I didn't like Shenzhen because it seemed foreign and dangerous, but after a while it was very nice, a new place with new faces and we didn't get raided there," said Siu Bak, a former addict of nine years who kicked the habit in 2005.

"It's far easier to get drugs in China. Any staff can get it for you. The security guards will just turn a blind eye or they will tell you to take them in the toilet," said Siu Bak, 24.

Ketamine is one of the most popular party drugs now in Hong Kong and it is proving to be a disastrous health hazard.

In a report published last week, a group of Hong Kong doctors detailed cases of bladder and kidney dysfunction in 10 ketamine addicts. Their mean age was 25, with the youngest only 18.

Among the symptoms, the addicts' bladders were able to hold the equivalent of only two tablespoons of urine and they needed to urinate every 15 minutes.

Ketamine, an anaesthetic for animals, has never been linked to such disorders. But street ketamine -- in the form of a white powder -- is diluted with cheap substances to fatten suppliers' profits.

Street ketamine can include washing powder, paint flakes, talcum powder, flour, painkillers and barbiturates, said scientists who have examined the drug.

"Some suppliers put in glass powder to give it a shine, which is a mark of high grade ketamine. They give you a nosebleed, but all ketamine does that after a while because all that snorting damages your nasal membranes," said Siu Bak, who used to use more than 30 packets of ketamine a day at the height of her addiction.

A packet of ketamine, containing about half a teaspoon of powder, cost HK$100 (US$12.80) a few years ago but can be obtained for as little as HK$20 now.

"These people are consuming all sorts of street ketamine, from different suppliers and we don't know what kind of contaminants they have been snorting," said Lau Fei-lung, director of the Hong Kong Poisons Information Centre, .

"We don't know if these disorders are due to ketamine or the cutting agents," he said. "Ketamine is normally not consumed this way. It's an anaesthetic agent and there have been no studies on its effect if it is taken daily, or twice a day, for years. The effect will be different, it will be totally unpredictable."

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