Date: 28 May 2010
By Joe Amon, Human Rights Watch (Published in Foreign Policy, 28 May 2010)
Excerpt
This month, nearly 600 drug addicts broke out of a rehabilitation center in the northern Vietnamese city of Haiphong. The addicts overpowered guards at the state-run treatment facility and made a break for it. "We were completely overwhelmed," a security guard told the Associated Press. "Forty of us were not able to prevent them, many with canes and bricks, from escaping." Videos on the Internet show crowds of escapees marching through city streets.
Why were hundreds of patients fleeing treatment? Because in Vietnam, "treatment" looks a lot more like forced labor, complete with beatings and years of involuntary detention. Like neighboring Cambodia, China, Laos, Malaysia, and Thailand, the government of Vietnam has adopted a "get-tough" approach to drug treatment rather than evidence-based treatment. In Vietnam, more than 100 government-run facilities detain between 35,000 to 45,000 people for extrajudicial sentences of up to four years...
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