Like most young people, minority kids need to 'belong' but can find it tough - leaving many to seek solace in the shadowy realm of drugs. Ming Yeung reports.

Life seemed pretty much a mess to Yuraj after he came to Hong Kong from Nepal in 2008. One of the big hang-ups was the never-ending frustration of trying to learn Chinese in a so-called "international" Form Three class. His classmates included Pakistanis, Nepalese, and Thais - all of whom were struggling just to fit in, with a culture alien to their own.

Yuraj made it through Form Five and couldn't take it anymore. He was so far behind in his studies he dropped out and started hanging out with fellow Nepalese who were into drugs. Where they came had a long entrenched drug culture, so for Yuraj, it seemed the thing to do. About 75 percent of the group, all guys, were into drugs. "I was the guy who gave priority to friends more than family," said the 23-year-old. "I just tried it for fun the first time. I had a girlfriend but we broke up, so I started (drugs) again."

Back in Nepal there had been a festival. It went on for a whole week and people could smoke pot without getting busted. Here in Hong Kong, the Nepalese drug culture was into sterner stuff - heroin, which Yuraj claimed was another Nepalese tradition. He started at a fifth of a gram a day, costing about HK$150. As he got more and more into it, he went up to almost a gram a day. By then, he was a full blown addict and, like his friends, was cranking in public toilets, unafraid of the cops. "People who take drugs don't have any fear at all," he said.

When his family found out, his dad was wretched and his mother cried. That bothered him. His father was a chef. He'd been Yuraj's role model. "I was really careless, with no feelings at all," he confessed. After the bad scene with his parents, he thought about giving up drugs but his need was too strong.

Finally, he got in touch with the Society of Rehabilitation and Crime Prevention (SRACP) and asked for help. The NGO works with ethnic people, offering community-based services and spreading the anti-drug message.

They got Yuraj into rehab, on Sept 16, 2015. He remembers that because he wanted to get clean but the craving was torture. In rehab, he started working out hard, hoping it would take his mind off his craving.

The Central Registry of Drug Abuse (CRDA), under the Security Bureau, collects information on drug abuse from newly reported users. The numbers were showing a steady decline. Between 2014 and 2015, there was a reported 5 percent drop from 9,059 to 8,598.

However, the CRDA admits it still doesn't have the full picture. There are plenty of abusers the registry doesn't even know about. The analysts started to twig to this when they started discovering "new" users not part of the official statistics who'd been into drugs for years. It all came out in the statistical break out that showed how long it took for drug abusers to come to the attention of the NGOs, hospitals and other treatment centers.

The numbers between 2005 and 2009 showed that users had been abusers between 1.7 and 2.1 years, on average, before they fell into the system. In 2014, the newly discovered users had been into drugs 5.1 years, on average, having escaped notice the entire time. Then, in 2015, the duration of drug abuse for the newly reported users leapt again to 5.8 years. Authorities were forced to acknowledge that the population of drug addicts was substantially larger than they'd believed. Many addicts were from ethnic minority communities.

Heroin abuse

A 2006 study, the Drug Abuse Situation among Ethnic Minorities in Hong Kong, showed that heroin was the most frequently abused drug (85 percent), followed by marijuana (57 percent) and cough syrup (51 percent).

Anthony Wong Lai-yin, supervisor of SRACP's Health Education Service, said heroin abuse is especially prevalent among Nepalese, who also have the highest rate of drug abuse among ethnic minorities. Among the native Hong Kong population only middle-aged addicts are into heroin.

"In the past, analgesics (mainly heroin) were the most common drug abused in Hong Kong," according to CRDA's report on Drug Abuse Trends for 2005-2014. "The proportion of abusers taking psychotropic substances also increased from 45 percent in 2005 to 61 percent in 2014."

"Among reported drug abusers aged under 21, ketamine was the most common drug of abuse, used by 47 percent of reported young abusers in 2014. Ketamine was followed by methamphetamine (38 percent), then cocaine (25 percent), cannabis (10 percent), heroin (5 percent) and cough medicine (3 percent)."

The problem of Nepalese drug abusers naturally became a particular cause for concern. So back in 2012, the Anthropology Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) looked into it. Some Nepalese kids took up the habit between 10 and 19, with the majority of that group into heroin abuse.

Nepalese drug abusers accounted for 3.2 percent of newly identified cases in 2014, more than double the 1.4 percent of new cases discovered by CRDA among the community in 2005.

The number of drug abusers from Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi/Sri Lankan backgrounds jumped from 0.4 percent to 1.4 percent over the same period. The number of addicted users had sharply grown, but there was no one to help them break the habit.

"Like general welfare and medical services, drug-related services are meant for everyone regardless of ethnicity. We have not laid down specific guidelines or restrictions on how relevant agencies should provide services to ethnic minority youths, as far as the drug problem is concerned," admitted the Secretary for Security at a Legislative Council meeting, in 2009. The best the authorities could do was to encourage NGOs to make the best use of the Beat Drugs Fund to come up with effective services.

Lack of cultural sensitivity

There are still no integrated strategies to tackle the problem even after 7 years. The lack of "cultural sensitivity" is what Wong and his frontline colleagues see as the reason the system has failed to attract kids from minority groups to seek help in the first place. Some minority kids are even glued to the conviction that any help group rooted in the Christian tradition will challenge their own beliefs, so they are reluctant to go for rehab.

"Most services are for Hong Kong locals. Some materials are in Chinese only. If I'm a user, I feel maybe this place isn't for me," said Angus Lau Kin-chung, project-in-charge at SRACP. That is why service providers have to learn the cultural differences and raise their awareness to avoid misunderstanding.

The most common centers for heroin abusers are methadone clinics (over 70 percent). The Department of Health says the clinics provide maintenance and detoxification programs for patients. "The methadone dosage will be reduced gradually over a period of time until there is no need for the patient to continue treatment," it says.

Fewer than one-third of ethnic minority addicts join residential rehabilitation programs in Hong Kong, according to the CUHK's study.

"To prevent ethnic minorities from getting early into drug abuse, to facilitate their rehabilitation, and to prevent relapses, a culture-based humanist approach is needed. In the short and medium term, collaboration with ex-drug abusers and their communities should be enhanced, and a culture-based program should be re-designed to involve them as partners," the CUHK report suggests.

A few years ago, SRACP discovered there was a shortage of services for youths who hung out at night. That's how Project Midnight Southray came to be. The aim was to cultivate an anti-drug culture among high-risk ethnic minority youth, promoting early identification of problems and providing assistance for those in need.

Acknowledging that trust is easier to establish from peer to peer, the project recruited nine full-time peer educators, together with another 10 who work part time. All came from non-Chinese backgrounds and were recovering abusers whose job was to provide guidance for those still fighting the monkey.

Madhan, 29, had a long history of drug taking. He was doing drugs in Nepal long before coming to Hong Kong in 2002. In Nepal, he used weed, sometimes cough syrup and sometimes "brown sugar", an adulterated form of heroin extracted from opium poppies.

Madhan worked at the airport when he came to Hong Kong and for the first year he stayed clean. His friends encouraged him to join them and get back into drugs. "I started taking cough syrup. Then in 2005, I started heroin." After that, in 2013, he said he took ice (another popular drug). In 2015, he was ordered by the courts to take a six-month treatment program at Hei Ling Chau Addiction Treatment Centre.

When he got out, Madhan contacted SRACP and started rebuilding his life. He wanted to share his experiences with those still lost at sea.

"I give them knowledge about what I did as an ex-drug user," said Madhan, who went through all the trials during his rehab before emerging as a role model for his peers.

One-stop service needed

Language training was what most ethnic minority drug abusers wanted most, according to the 2006 Study on the Drug Abuse Situation among Ethnic Minorities in Hong Kong. The study also revealed that minorities also want better peer support, outpatient, community integration, and employment services.

SRACP now provides one-stop service, comprised of drug education and counseling. It's also offering temporary hostels for patients after they're discharged from rehab.

Every drug abuser has a distinctive path toward complete withdrawal. The SRACP provides healthier, recreational activities like sports and music. But it still doesn't have enough space - something that's not even covered by the funding. "For fixed assets, they (sponsors) don't sponsor. If they work at night and need a service car, we can't have one," Wong revealed.

The government's Beat Drugs Fund, established in 1996 with a capital outlay of HK$350 million, was given an additional injection of HK$3 billion in 2010, as the city raised the bar on support for anti-drug efforts by NGOs. Still not many of them targeted ethnic minorities specifically.

The SRACP program is the only one with a combined focus on drugs, youth, and ethnic minorities. If the program doesn't receive continued support, Wong said, after a few years, all the accumulated wisdom and experience will be lost.

Yuraj got straight and quit meeting his old friends. "If I go and meet them, I will backslide. We used to take drugs together, same place, same thing, same time, same feeling. If I met them, it would remind me of my old days," he said.

Yuraj said he is learning to re-integrate with society through SRACP. He still thinks there should be more drug education for new immigrants, who may not realize the danger they're in.

Contact the writer at

mingyeung@chinadailyhk.com

(HK Edition 09/28/2016 page8)