Meth addiction besieges Japanese

TOKYO - Yoichi Tsubokura, 51, has spent two-thirds of his life addicted to methamphetamines. Speed had such a grip over him that he once used money earmarked for his mother's funeral to get high.

Three years ago, however, he entered counseling, kicked the habit and now works with other addicts hoping to get straight. But fighting the scourge sometimes seems hopeless, he says, as the use of uppers increases in Japan.

"It's so widespread," Tsubokura says, his face etched with deep creases from years of hard living. "I just want people to know what hell I went through so they can avoid it."

Rough estimates by police suggest that 2.2 million people in Japan consume about 18 tons of speed annually, exceeding the number of users of marijuana and all other illegal drugs combined.

And recently, the drug has been landing on Japanese shores in chart-busting quantities, ringing alarm bells with police, educators and social scientists. Just two seizures in Japanese ports since January netted a combined 1,030 pounds, after a record 4,355 pounds taken in 1999. This compares with just 478 pounds in 1989.

In October, a sting on the island of Kyushu netted 1,243 pounds of amphetamines smuggled on a Taiwanese boat. It was Japan's largest-ever seizure of the drug.

By far the richest country in the region, Japan also has lots of hard-to-patrol coastline. Its "yakuza" criminal underworld also is well-organized and well-funded, and ready to provide a sales network for smuggled drugs.

Despite the record hauls, street prices haven't increased, a sign that police aren't making much headway. "We estimate we're only getting about 10 percent," says Wataru Ohashi, deputy director of drug enforcement with the National Police Agency. "With such huge profits at stake, criminal groups are moving in much more aggressively."

Part of the surge reflects supply-side economics. Japan produces almost no speed itself, but criminal groups elsewhere in Asia are expanding their exports to Japan to earn valuable yen, experts say.

And although police here can coordinate with their counterparts in China - which accounts for an estimated 40 percent of the supply - Japan has little influence in North Korea and Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle, both of which have surged as suppliers in recent years.

Speed traditionally was sold directly by "yakuza" or by ratty motorcycle gangs. In the last several years, however, crime syndicates have hired more Iranians, Filipinos and other immigrants. This has expanded the sales force and broadened the appeal, because the foreigners often are less scary than fearsome yakuza to soft-core customers.

Authorities say dealers also have become increasingly skilled at using cell phones, beepers, the Internet and overnight delivery services. This often means buyers and sellers never meet, making it tougher to engineer a bust. And a shift to pill and powder forms, rather than traditional injectable doses, has expanded the appeal among a middle class wary of contracting AIDS.

Unfortunately, the gangs also are finding young Japanese increasingly receptive. Arrests among senior and junior high school students have gone up several fold in recent years, albeit from a small base.

"The conventional value system has collapsed," said Shingo Takahashi, a psychiatrist at Toho University and a noted expert on troubled youth. "Often there's a real sense of cultural emptiness."

Relative to the United States, Japan's drug problem is still tiny. Fewer than 20,000 speed users are arrested each year, of which fewer than 500 are high school students, in a nation of 126 million people. By Japanese standards, however, the problem is huge, recently prompting the government to set up an interagency task force under Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi.

Methamphetamine - a potent form of amphetamine known as "speed" - was invented by a Japanese scientist looking for new plant-derived medicines in 1888. Toward the end of World War II, kamikaze pilots injected it before flying off to their deaths.

While past abuse tended to be found among truck drivers, prostitutes, gangsters and others battling fatigue, experts believe the current wave is led by younger people.

More teenage girls are becoming addicted to the drug after starting off by using it as a diet aid. Rising numbers of teenage boys, feeling bored with school or work, thrive on the artificial sense of purpose the drug provides.

Health officials, meanwhile, are concerned by the potential problems posed by the tendency of amphetamine users to inject the drug, which provides a more intense high than other means of ingestion.

While the AIDS virus still is less common in Japan than in the West, intravenous amphetamine abuse could propel its spread if needles are shared, said Mitsunobu Imai, a virologist at the Kanagawa Prefectural Institute of Health.

A more pressing issue is hepatitis C, a contagious disease that can destroy the liver. About 60 percent of Japanese amphetamine users who shoot up carry the virus.

Information from The Associated Press is included in this report. -------------------------

Key players in Japan's amphetamine trade:

Yakuza: Japan's underworld gangs get much of their income from drugs. Gangsters are believed to be expanding trade with mainland Asian smugglers.

North Korea: Police say a third of amphetamines smuggled into Japan in 1999 originated in North Korea. Officials believe drugs are transferred at sea to fishing boats or attached to buoys.

Taiwan: With the world's third-busiest container port, Taiwan is a transit point for drugs headed to Japan from China and Southeast Asia. Taiwan was a big amphetamine producer, but trade shifted to China after a crackdown.

China: Ephedra plant, a key amphetamine ingredient, grows wild in northern China and gangs supply its derivative chemical to drug labs across region.

Southeast Asia: Much of the amphetamines reaching Japan are made at jungle labs in the Golden Triangle, opium-producing area where Thailand, Myanmar and Laos abut.