Controlling illicit drug users in China: From incarceration to community?

Abstract

Managing a population of illicit drug users remains essentially a ‘law and order’ issue for neoliberal societies. There has been a wider disciplinary movement in the control of this population from incarceration to risk management. This paper specifically examines the community rehabilitation program in an urban city in China, in light of the claimed policy change. Using in-depth interviews with illicit drug users, it reveals how state control has been extended over this group. A comparative analysis with drug treatment in the West raises some dissonances through crime control lens. Limitations of this study as well as suggestions for future research are discussed.

Keywords

China community drug treatment control risk assessment risky population

Introduction

China has shifted from a socialist country to a neoliberal state since the late 1970s (Ren, 2010). The planned socialist economy of pre-1978 gave way to a market economy that maximizes commercial trade and interests. In the post-1978 reform era, economic activities, urbanization and constant internal migration became buzzwords. Governing a diverse population through the turmoil of these rapid social changes posed an unprecedented challenge for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As in any other country, maintaining stability and securing economic development in a late modernity categorized by insecurity and risks is never an easy task.

Having enjoyed a ‘drug-free’ society due to drug-eradication campaigns in the early 1950s (Liang, Lu, & Miethe, 2013), China witnessed a resurge of illicit drug use and drug-related crimes in the post-1978 reform era. Perceiving a worsening social disorder, the CCP adopted a social management system in the 1980s that integrates multiple means (economic, social, political, educational, etc.) and mobilizes all societal sectors to combat and prevent crime. This system for social prevention is known as ‘comprehensive social order management’ (shehui zhi’an zonghe zhili) and will be touched upon later.

In the wake of the drug abuse that re-surfaced in the mid-to-late 1980s, China adopted five different measures to counter addiction (Sapio, 2010). In addition to the non-coercive measure of signing up at private rehabilitation clinics, the other four measures involved the police and included the registration of drug addicts at the police station, administrative detention, compulsory drug rehabilitation and compulsory rehabilitation through labour. The latter two measures isolated illicit drug users from the majority of society, preventing them from spreading or causing harm to others, and went through re-structuring in 2008 with the adoption of Drug Prohibition Law. The separation of custodial and noncustodial measures was set out, with the former referring to compulsory drug rehabilitation and the latter to community-based treatment program. Policymakers and scholars both seemed to welcome the community program (Hu, 2008), which allows illicit drug users to get rid of drug dependence in the community (shequ jiedu), or consolidating the detox effects after release from a rehabilitation centre (shequ kangfu).

This policy shift seems to accord with the broad trend in social control from the ‘carceral’ to ‘risk management’ of the problem population (Mugford, 1993) in some Western countries. Few studies, however, have examined the extent to which China has likewise moved from carceral control to embracing risk practice. Searching for the answer to this question is also an engine of reflecting on the current discourse in drug control policy in contemporary China, as well as providing a snapshot of its latest development in the mode of governance. An analysis of literature and policy documents, and interviews with illicit drug users, suggests that this field is embedded in coercive police control through various mechanisms, and that the police retain ultimate power in managing this population in the name of social stability. Contrary to the claimed shift from carceral to risk assessment, or from state coercion to community slackening of control, China’s recent move actually involves intensified surveillance. The paper then proceeds with a limited comparative analysis with drug control in neoliberal societies.

Theses of risk and risk management

The thesis of risk society (Beck, 1992) remains indisputably one of the most influential discourses in social theory in the past few decades. Everyday life in postmodern culture has been full of insecurities, hazards and uncertainties. Human existence has faced unprecedented threats and become ontologically insecure. In theoretical terms, risk is ‘an objective entity, to be mastered by calculation, assessment and probability’ (Mythen & Walklate, 2006, p. 1). Despite doubts and questions regarding the assumption that we are currently inhabiting a ‘global risk society’ (Mythen & Walklate, 2006), the massive presence of risk assessment of the offending population has become a defining theme in the recent development of the criminal justice edifice. As Feeley and Simon (1992) note, the rehabilitative or correctional aspirations of the old penology have given way to risk management embraced by the new penology.

The usual calculations of risk in the criminal justice system serve three distinctive purposes: risk control, risk management and risk reduction (Clear & Cadora, 2001). In the past half a century in Western neoliberal societies, risk practice, and risk control in particular, has triggered substantive concern over individual rights (Pratt, 2017), including for those at the margins of society. Compared to the dominant mainstream class, the marginal population is more likely to be subject to surveillance, discipline and overt punishment in postmodern culture (Mugford, 1993; Young, 1999). Mugford (1993) noted the tension between law enforcement – surveillance and discipline – and harm reduction in drug control, which is rhetorically in line with risk assessment.

Harm minimization ideology began to gain popularity in some Western neoliberal states in the 1980s (Room & Hall, 2013), as an antithesis or counteraction to the punitive waves of the ‘war on drugs’. There is still ambiguity regarding what harm minimization entails (Miller, 2001); however, it is notable that various non-state sectors and private organizations have formed partnerships with state apparatuses to provide social services and treatment (Thomas, Bull, Dioso-Villa, & Smith, 2016). The criminal justice system remains the pivotal site for drug treatment, and offers various programs to which illicit drug users can be referred for treatment offered by various non-state actors. Those who successfully conclude with these programs are exempted from prison sentence or a criminal record (Hughes & Ritter, 2008). Situated at the community level, these therapeutic treatment agencies exert social control over illicit drug users. Not only that treatment at the hands of private sectors adds another layer of control in the punishment process, mostly through supervision and imposing the program conditions (Lucken, 1997), but adverse effects such as net widening with these community drug treatment programs can occur (Indermaur & Roberts, 2003). As such, punitive carceral control seems to have faded away, whilst risk control in the form of community supervision comes to the fore.

In light of this development as part of the ‘new penology’ (Feeley & Simon, 1992; Simon & Feeley, 2003), it would be interesting to examine community control and treatment of drug addicts in contemporary China. As intended, community programs are designed to promote the social reintegration of drug addicts, avoiding the labelling and stigmatization effects normally associated with custodial treatment (Zeng, 2011). However, to understand the present, there is necessity to sketch out the ‘old’ path that China has come along in regulating illicit drugs and drug users.

Treating illicit drug users in China: Historical trajectories

Sapio (2010) noticed that the genesis of compulsory drug rehabilitation centres can be traced back to the period of Republican China, at a time when widespread opium smoking was perceived as a threat to the nation. The compulsory centres were transplanted by the CCP into its Soviet base areas, then the People’s Republic of China and ended in the early 1950s. Compulsory rehabilitation was revived in the reform era that witnessed a re-emergence of drug abuse, and eventually became entrenched in the legal system and constituted an essential part of the police powers.

The police exercised coercive detention powers in governing drug users: administrative detention, coercive rehabilitation at the compulsory centre (jiedusuo), and rehabilitation at the camps of re-education through labour (Biddulph, 2007; Sapio, 2010). Administrative detention was imposed as drug use was deemed a violation of public order. In 1986 the Public Security Administrative Punishments Regulation provided for the imposition of fines and administrative detention for up to 15 days for users of drugs, and its subsequent replacement the Security Administrative Punishments Law in 2006 re-affirmed the regulatory power of imposing detention on users of drug.

The perceived threat of drugs in the 1980s also led the government to take punitive actions such as the periodic hard-strike campaigns to counter addiction. Centres for coercive drug rehabilitation (jiedusuo) were established in some localities at this time. The term to be served at the jiedusuo lasted between three and six months, and could be extended to one year if six months were insufficient to achieve complete withdrawal.¹ In 1991, the Decision on the Prohibition of Drugs (hereafter the Prohibition Decision) issued by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (hereafter NPCSC) provided that ‘For those who take in and inject drugs and become addicted, apart from what is prescribed in the previous clause [administrative detention and fines], they shall be forced to detoxify and receive treatment and education. Those who relapse after the compulsory detoxification will be subject to re-education through labour, thereby getting rid of addiction in the camps’.

Thus, a third coercive power in regulating users of drug was to place them in the camps of re-education through labour (laodong jiaoyang, hereafter RETL). Initially a compulsory education measure designed in 1957 and targeted at a certain category of people that ‘idle, violate instructions and rules, and do not perform any subsistence-related business’, it intended to transform these subjects into self-reliant ‘new’ people beneficial to socialist construction.² In the reform era, however, these RETL camps became a ‘shelter’ for keeping drug addicts (including those relapsed after the jiedusuo) in custody, for a term lasting from one to a maximum of four years. The Notice on Provisions on Handling Cases of Re-education through Labour issued by the Ministry of Public Security in 2002, simply rationalized RETL as a measure for drug addicts by extending its previous scope to drug addicts who relapse after the compulsory drug rehabilitation. Neither jiedusuo nor RETL had any success in reducing drug abuse: the population of detainees not only increased, but drug addicts in actuality entered into a vicious detention–relapse cycle (Fu, 2005; Sapio, 2010).

RETL was finally repealed on 28 December 2013 by the Decision on Abolishing Legislative Regulations Concerning Re-education Through Labour by the NPCSC, following the Resolution Concerning Some Major Issues in Comprehensively Deepening Reform passed at the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central CCP on 12 November 2013. In many places the RETL camps were transformed into compulsory centres for drug rehabilitation (Zhou, 2014). Bull and Zhou (2017) noted that the end of RETL did not function as diversion of offenders out of programs of detention but rather as a form of ‘diversion into’. Nonetheless, the 2008 Drug Prohibition Law claims to provide a different set of drug-detoxification system concerning the treatment of illicit drug users (Yang, Zhou, Hao, & Xiao, 2014).

One of the key tenets of the 2008 Drug Prohibition Law was shoring up community detoxification measures for illicit drug users. Accordingly, illicit drug users are given the option of being placed in the community as opposed to being incarcerated and isolated from society. Compared with custody ‘rehabilitation’, the community program promises humane and beneficial to social reintegration – it allows drug addicts to become free of their drug dependency within society, maintaining their normal social life and function, and avoiding the stigma associated with custody. Despite this, it is the police who decide the circumstances in which drug addicts are placed in the community (Biddulph & Xie, 2011). Sapio (2010, p.182) argues that the ‘[v]arious preventive, follow-up, and control measures introduced in the 1990s to cure mild addictions and to lower the relapse rate of former inmates have been rationalized under the guise of community rehabilitation and community recovery’. As noted, registering drug addicts at the police station has been an enabler for exerting community control and exercising unchecked coercive powers.

There is thus a critical need for appraisal of the extent to which the policymakers have departed from the detention ideology and turned to the community to rehabilitate drug addicts. Has the community effectively served as a basis for drug addicts to get back to society? So far, there has been no empirical study looking at how community-based treatment is experienced by drug addicts in the context of claimed policy progress. The current study utilizes a qualitative study with drug addicts conducted in Shanghai, an urban city in contemporary China.

Community drug rehabilitation program in Shanghai and research access

The 2008 Drug Prohibition Law (2008 Law) and the State Council Regulation on Drug Detoxification in 2011 (2011 Regulation) both direct that the street offices of cities or the government of the town is responsible for carrying out the community program. They shall build a work team, deploy specialized staff (zhuanzhi gongzuo renyuan), make a work plan and carry out drug detoxification measures (article 15 of the 2011 Regulation); signing contracts with the drug addicts is required (article 16 of the 2011 Regulation). Drug detoxification measures include teaching detox-related knowledge; education and persuasion; occupational skills training, occupation guidance, assistance in schooling, employment and medical support and other measures that help addicts get rid of addiction (article 18 of the 2011 Regulation). The work team consists of specialized staff, community police, community medical staff, the family of drug addicts and volunteers (article 17 of the 2011 Regulation). This institutional edifice for a community program is indicative of Chinese ‘community’ as embedded in administrative power and resources. As noted by Bray (2006), China’s official discourse on ‘community’ designates it as a basic unit of urban social, political and administrative organization.

Unlike compulsory drug rehabilitation under the 2008 Law, which normally takes two years with one extra year possible by extension, community rehabilitation (shequ jiedu) takes a fixed period of three years. Community recovery (shequ kangfu), with a maximum length of three years and sharing similar measures with community rehabilitation, is imposed indiscriminately on those who are released from the compulsory centre. There is therefore an estimate that nine years in total can be imposed on a drug addict: three years’ community rehabilitation, three years’ detention rehabilitation (two normal years and one extra year as extended by the authority), plus three years’ community recovery. Except in ‘hard’ scenarios, such as ‘pregnant women or mothers feeding a baby of under one year old’ (article 39 of the 2008 Law), there is no such provision ordering that community rehabilitation must be granted. The police exerts discretion in deciding on community rehabilitation vis-à-vis compulsory rehabilitation.

When placed under community program, a drug addict is required to comply with the contract, to receive regular drug tests as requested by the police and to report to the authority before leaving the domicile for more than three days (article 19 of the 2011 Regulation). Avoiding or rejecting drug tests three times, or leaving their domicile three times or for more than 30 days without reporting, will be considered ‘a violation of the contract’ (article 20 of the 2011 Regulation). If staff become aware of situations where the drug addict rejects community rehabilitation, takes or injects drugs during the term of serving community rehabilitation, or seriously breaches the contract, they must report it to the police (article 35 of the 2008 Law and article 21 of the 2011 Regulation).

In 2003 Shanghai founded Z Social Services as a service provider for treating illicit drug users whilst assisting the government in managing dangerous social groups and maintaining social stability.³ Shanghai’s Narcotics Control Committee organizes, coordinates and guides work on community drug rehabilitation (article 2 of the 2011 Regulation). As a non-profitable sector, Z Social Services advocates the ideals and methods of social work, offering a humane and professional service to drug addicts, and promoting respect, inclusion and empowerment (Sun, 2016). Under the ‘government purchases service’ model (Fan, Lv, & Yu, 2009), the social workers recruited are paid from the funds that the government assigns. In theory, and in the Charter for Z Social Services, its commitment includes employment consultation, legal advice, supervision through drug testing and psychological counselling (Fan et al., 2009; Tang, 2017), but it is unclear how they actually work out for drug addicts. If a changed political ideology is indicated in the embrace and expansion of community treatment, to what extent has China favoured risk assessment in the community whilst acknowledging the pitfalls and weaknesses in carceral control? The current study explores this.

It is true that access to the marginalized population such as illicit drug users has remained difficult (Liamputtong, 2006). One reason is that repeated stigmatization and long-time repression have rendered this group hidden and ‘invisible’ from society. In public imagination, this marginalized group represents the ‘outcast’, or the ‘devil’, posing great threats to social order (Luo et al., 2014). A viable way to recruit participants lies in perhaps snowballing sampling (Emmel, 2013). In the current study, a former drug addict and a social worker acted as bridges between the author and the participants. The study group included those who were receiving community drug treatment at the time of the interview, and those who had avoided drugs for years but had previous experiences with community programs.

Qualitative research methods allow researchers to hear the voices of those who are ‘silenced, othered, and marginalized by the dominant social order’ (Liamputtong, 2006, p. 7). This study secured in-depth interviews with 20 participants. Each interview took approximately 1 hour in various informal settings. Private meeting space was secured, to ensure that the participants were able to engage in open and frank talk, without being interrupted or overheard. To protect the privacy and safety of the participants, all the names were anonymized. The semi-structured interviews focused on each drug addict’s drug-taking history, experience with drug rehabilitation, and their process and path to reintegration and so on. Questions asked about the (ex-) drug addicts’ experience with community control focused on the forms of community drug treatment to which they had been subject, how they perceived their contact with social workers and their experience with the police and how they perceived this contact.

Controlling moral monsters: Police and social workers

Control directed at illicit drug users in the community contains both formal, punitive and stigmatizing control exercised by the police, and informal but ineffective control via local practitioners. The community program in Shanghai involves the intersection of police and social workers. The claimed ‘community’, as such, is by no means devoid of coercion and discipline.

In theory the police ‘allows’ illicit drug users to be placed in the community, much alike the self-regulation of risk – that is, if the subject can successfully get rid of drug dependency in community, proving that they pose no harm to society, there is no further need to subject them to custody that amounts to harsh punishment. Reality is somewhat different, however. As noted, ‘non-custody’ involves intensive surveillance through a mechanism called dynamic control, which puts all the illicit drug users in an aggregate system and keeps track of their social movement. The underlying rationale presumes this group to be dangerous and risky (Chen, 2016).

Dynamic control based upon risk technology is actually painful for illicit drug users, and tremendously hinders their social reintegration. They were constantly stopped in subways to have their ID checked and then taken to have their urine tested. Moreover, because their IDs were all registered in the system; when they checked into a hotel or took a train, the police would immediately arrive to take them for drug testing. What was the consequence of this intensive surveillance? For many respondents, it was very stigmatizing, acting as a hindrance to their reintegration in society by disturbing their normal life and work. Various respondents in the study shared their frustrating experiences of how their normal social life was affected. A drug user, with a history of more than 20 years’ drug taking, was placed under community supervision at the time of interviewing, following his release from custody.

‘Like me who takes drugs, now I am back in society. It is another matter whether I take drugs again. But my ID card has a problem [is tagged], which is that it is in a nationwide system. For example, if I hang out with friends I make at a new workplace, the police would come to check on me. Then others would ask what was wrong with me before. This sort of things does happen… This control measure hurts, and does no good…What is being controlled? The purpose of putting you in the system is to capture you’. (interview with ZXM)

The mechanism of dynamic control is a product of perceiving the drug abusing population as risk bearer. This rationale spawns a form of extreme managerialism in that even those who have renounced drugs for a long time are still subject to control. This hinders the road to employment, and shuts the door on many illicit drug users who want to turn a new page. The custody record in compulsory rehabilitation centres, which is equivalent to a criminal record, also blocks opportunities for starting afresh. To some extent, this systematic exclusion, in parallel with intensive surveillance, has formed a layer of punitive state control even though it is community based.

Drug testing, whilst intended to be a tool for monitoring the progress made by illicit drug users, actually functions as a deterrent. From the perspective of illicit drug users, it is often a tool subject to manipulation by the police, for them to meet a quota (zhibiao) – which specifies how many illicit drug users they should capture per season or year.

‘They need to meet the quota.’ (interview with WJF)

‘Now they cannot capture enough. To meet the quota, they are compelled to try every means to cast people in’. (interview with LJ)

Risk technology has greatly transformed the practice of drug testing. A more sophisticated technique of hair analysis has recently been used for drug users, which can monitor a period of up to six months’ period whereas the traditional urine test only monitors the days or weeks in which a person under surveillance falls into drug-taking again. The employment of such risk tools has moved beyond deterrence; as perceived by many drug users, it actually falls into abuse – if the police need to take more people into custody, to meet their quota, then the hair test will be used.

‘They presume that perhaps within three months you have taken drugs, so they use the hair test on you. Once the result comes out, OK, they take you into custody. Sometimes when they ask you to take the hair test, you agree because you think you have stopped taking drugs. But it turns out the way I described. Many people are caught by the police in this way nowadays’. (Interview with WCH)

‘This practice is really bad. Why? Like what if I tried drugs again after I was released from compulsory rehabilitation centres, but I realised that this was wrong, and I decided to make a change. But at this moment you (the police) caught me again and took me into custody. There is no chance to make a change’. (Interview with SY)

‘Now it totally screws us up. There is no opportunity for us to make a change. He (the police) just insists that you take drugs all the time, even if you stopped ten or twenty years ago. It means you will never have your day’. (Interview with ZJ)

The police control in these cases amounts to stigmatization and relentless condemnation, and is coupled with periodical intensive actions against illicit drugs, a form of the campaign style of law enforcement (He, 2015) which results in more illicit drug users being caught in the net. If the police rely on risk technology to improve the effectiveness of their control over subjects (Simon & Feeley, 2003), how do social workers exert control? In Shanghai, social workers employed by Z Social Services bear another name: anti-drug social workers (jindu shegong), and this term covers a broader remit than simply helping people to cease illicit drug use (jiedu). Both the official document⁴ and the Charter of Z Social Services suggest the activities of social workers should include supervision, persuasion and education, support and assistance. Yet, seen from the perspective of the clients, none of these aspects have the effect they are designed for.

Community supervision seems to be confined to contacting clients regularly for drug testing or knowing their whereabouts. For drug users, it is merely a formality, an exercise in futility in effecting any compliance.

I consider the role of social workers very minimal, if there is any. Basically I would say it is a formality (xingtong xushe). Take the drug testing each month for example, do you know how it works? Most of the social workers just wait for you outside. You go in the room alone. What if you pour some green tea in it, who would know? They (social workers) have no idea about it? No, they know it. It is just you are well, I am well, and then all is well. There is no need to be too serious about it. (Interview with KC)

I only met my former social worker once. We left a telephone number to each other. After a couple of days, he called me. After the call, I felt, he was actually of no help to me. However, I had to be under his supervision. They (social workers) called you or asked you to make an appearance for nothing, or only for drug testing. That was too troublesome. So I cancelled that phone number, and he could not reach me anymore. (Interview with AM)

This all seems to suggest that the supervision of social workers is in actuality sporadic and temporary. Social workers can in no way impose punishments on their clients, nor do they have any authority in law enforcement. Findings from previous studies suggest that social workers were either perceived as ‘cadres’ of the government (Zeng, 2007) or very low trust was placed on them since they were perceived to maintain close connection with the police (Sun, 2016). Similarly, most respondents in the current study felt the supervision from their social worker was simply helping the police to exert control. When confronted with a violation of the contract by their clients, social workers can only refer it to the police for decision. However, this would impair their work ethics such as confidentiality, and do harm to any trust relationship built with their clients.

The support and assistance provided to their clients is insufficient or minimal, although previous research suggests that social support in terms of housing, residence permits, social security, medical care or education is desperately needed for the re-entry population (Jin, 2014). Most respondents felt that the available resources and assistance could not meet their needs.

‘At most, the social workers just give us calls, asking how we are doing, telling us what we should not do. That’s all he can do, at most. If he is closer to you, he may tell you where you can find shelter, ask you to go there and take a look. In fact, what they can do is very limited’. (Interview with ZXM)

‘To be frank, what did the social workers do except make a few calls? He did nothing! The money spent on them (social workers) would do better if it was given to the illicit drug users directly from the local government. They (illicit drug users) would at least appreciate the government and be grateful’. (Interview with XY)

‘Social workers only ask you to attend drug testing…For those of us who are just released into society, they cannot help with anything, they cannot find a job for you’. (Interview with WCH)

This ostensible relationship between social workers and illicit drug users partly explains the high relapse rate among those who are just released from custody. Upon release, and suffering from an extreme lack of social support, emotionally and financially, the only comfort they can seek is from their old circle with whom they used to take drugs. Care and respect are needed from individual social workers, but one respondent found that their social workers just denounced them and then became outraged about this apparent stigmatisation.

‘I heard once what the social workers exactly said: these blasted drug addicts, they will end up like this sooner or later. I rebutted them, saying that I will beat you if you are not social workers’ (interview with YCF).

In most cases as found in the current study, illicit drug users generally had negative attitudes towards the social workers.

Education and persuasion seem to be limited to telling illicit drug users not to perform certain risky behaviours, or organizing some education sessions. However, it does not seem to have any effect. Many consider such ‘big talk’ sessions useless and not really catering to their needs, whilst what they sought was genuine care and support. Where the social workers tried to engage family members to discipline the behaviour of their clients, it proved to be useless when a trusting and supportive relationship was not established in the first place.

‘He (the social worker) considered that caring about my daughter was actually caring for me. But I told him that he still had to care more about me. He contacted my mother and my daughter, simply wanting to know my whereabouts, right?!’ (Interview with LJ)

Controlling dilemmas or complementary control?

The abandonment of RETL somewhat signaled a shift in managing illicit drug users from carceral control to risk assessment. However, China retains ‘custody’ as an education measure, demonstrated by the large population in compulsory drug rehabilitation centres, where the minimum threshold is two years. Nonetheless, it also seeks to regulate the evil of drug use in the community, monitoring the progress and movement of drug users and imposing supervision and surveillance. As in the West, state intrusion into the lives of illicit drug users is justified on the grounds of a reduction in risk to the wider populous. If the clients fail to ‘rehabilitate’ themselves, or fail the drug treatment program in the community, then a higher tariff has to be paid, which is incarceration.

The control exerted is, in many ways, experienced as stigmatizing and devastative. The current field of community supervision and control involves complexities and contradictions. As a police-dominated sphere, community drug treatment in Shanghai is permeated with direct state control. Social workers are not able to hold their clients to varying requirements and conditions, nor do they have any real effect in supervising or rehabilitating their clients. Their ‘soft’ standing seems more a complementary to punitive control, rather than representing themselves as an empowered community to help their clients back into society.

The evidence reported in this study about the standing of social workers is shared by other localities, such as Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei province (Su, 2017). Generally speaking, social workers and these agencies across China are subordinate to the government (Spires, 2011), which suggests they have no equal footing with government departments in drug-related matters including policymaking. Although an agency is supposed to operate autonomously, the reality is that the government is not only a major force in establishing and fostering its growth, but in daily work social workers undertake many administrative tasks for the government (Shing, 2009). This inhibits the emancipation of their professional role. To exacerbate the case, programs are underdeveloped and under-resourced (Qiu & Gao, 2008). There is also a lack of coordination between health agencies and local governments (Xue et al., 2005) in the provision of treatment services.

The thesis described above does not, however, count as sufficient explanation. The official policy line often goes that China takes an all-society approach in engaging relevant government sectors in managing and controlling illicit drug users (Trevaskes, 2013). It is true that the Narcotics Control Committee at the central or local levels comprises the police, the justice department, the health sector and so on. However, the power of governing illicit drug use remains exclusively with the police. It is subject to no accountability checks from other penal apparatuses, such as the court. The ‘net-widening’ issue, therefore, depends on the police, which is ultimately politically charged. For instance, it was reported that when the ‘big campaign of taking in drug addicts for treatment’ (da shoujie) was launched, the police just waited at the methadone treatment clinics and arrested drug addicts who came in for treatment (Su, 2017).

Clearly, the primary ideology is not health-centred but to maintain social stability by bringing a dangerous population under control (Bull & Zhou, 2017). This priority gives rise to draconian law enforcement, triggering worries about the rights protection of marginal groups, as is also true in the West (Kato, 2017; Pratt, 2017; Young & Petersila, 2015). Driven by this ideology, it is not only social workers who are simply reduced to ‘para-police’, or ‘senior police assistants’ (Tang, 2017), which stands in stark contrast to their advocacy of social work values, but all the other involved departments may have to give in to political needs. This particular institutional reality leads to distrust and disenfranchisement in illicit drug users.

The community program has become an extension of state control. This is not dissimilar to some Western practices in which the collaboration between the social services and the police or court renders the former into extensions of penal apparatus (Wacquant, 2009). The advent of community-based corrections and diversionary options in the West has drawn criticism against the expansion of state control. For instance, Cohen (1979) notes that while appearing softened, social control extended to the community can nonetheless be punitive. ‘[O]n the one hand, the repressive, interventionist reach of the state should be blunted, on the other, the “community” should become more involved in the day to day business of prevention and control’ (Cohen, 1979, p. 353). In other words, social control in the community sphere ‘was not concentrated and centralized but dispersed throughout the social body’ (Cohen, 1985, p. 220).

Concluding remarks

This study explored community control of dangerous population, in this case illicit drug users, through an empirical study conducted with (ex-) illicit drug users in an urban context in China. As in the West, risky individuals and populations are targets for intervention, subject to profiling, surveillance and exclusion (Mcalinden, 2006; Pratt, 2017). Using a limited comparative analysis with drug control in the West, this study suggests that while state control expands through various treatment mechanisms and programs within the criminal justice systems in Western liberal societies, in China the police’s direct punitive and stigmatizing control dominates the community sphere. This is certainly connected to the weak standing of social agencies in authoritarian regimes.

In a political context preoccupied with risk control, concern about the rights of marginalized groups comes to the fore. The risk principle in community-based interventions usually requires a treatment targeted at different levels of risk (Bonta & Andrews, 2007). In China, due to a preoccupation with risk control, drug addicts, albeit their levels of risk, high, medium or low, are all subject to surveillance.⁵ This comes back to the findings of the preceding section. In the Western context, risk and rehabilitation increase in parallel and reinforce each other – that is, effective rehabilitation under the ‘what works’ movement is based upon the risk principle, which in turn maximizes the rehabilitative potential (Robinson, 2016). By contrast, in the context of China’s community treatment program, police control diminishes the ‘rehabilitation’ role supposedly undertaken by other agencies, which in this context are social workers.

The way a country regulates the use of illicit drugs genuinely reflects a country’s concerns and spirit. As Room and Hall (2013) note, there are four ‘governing images’ of drug use entrenched in drug policies – as a sin, a crime, a disease or a disability, each involving different social institutions. As demonstrated in this empirical study, risk management of illicit drug users in the community still prioritizes deterrence and exclusion. While the community drug treatment program claims to prioritize a health approach, clearly this does not withstand scrutiny from the clients’ perspective. On the contrary, illicit drug use is considered a ‘crime’ and illicit drug users are ‘criminals’. This perception dominates the community treatment program, hardly making the ‘community’ a basis for reintegration (Li, 2012). The policy implication from this study is that the current governing ideology, which is based upon the exclusion and control of a dangerous population, needs an overhaul. Only change will allow a more humane and effective community-based treatment of illicit drug users to be achievable.

The limitation of the current study merits attention, however. First, as it takes a snowballing approach, which means the respondents are known to each other, it is unknown whether and the extent to which the opinion expressed by some respondents might have actually been influenced by other members of the group. In the meantime, however, as one of the sources of the respondents was a social worker, there may be some degree of trustworthiness in the sample. Second, there is a notable lack of observational data in the current study. While the literature and the legal framework have suggested that the police have had a strong hold on the drug treatment framework, it is hoped that future research employing observations will produce more insights.

Footnotes

Acknowledgment

The author appreciates the comments and suggestions from anonymous reviewers. Thanks also go to all the participants for their contribution. Special thanks to Dr. Enshen Li for the discussion and reading the earlier drafts of this work.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author's research is sponsored by the Shanghai Young Eastern Scholar Program.

Notes

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