Addiction recovery and HIV/AIDS
harm reduction in China

by Rian Dundon

In China’s Yunnan province countless lives have been ravaged by addiction and disease as a result of the mass import of heroin from neighboring Myanmar and Laos since economic expansion began in the early 1980’s.

Daytop Kunming is an organization providing aid to those affected in Yunnan’s capital city of Kunming. Borrowing its name and philosophy from the Daytop program in New York, Daytop Kunming stresses the therapeutic community (TC) concept of recovery from substance abuse. As Daytop Kunming’s director Yang Mao Bin puts it, “Here we put responsibility on them. We say, you are not a patient and this is not a hospital. You want to grow up and take responsibility for your own personal growth? Then come and be part of this family. That’s what Daytop is, a family.”

Daytop Kunming offers a network of drop-in centers, maintains a vigilant needle exchange program, and administers methadone to more than 200 people a day. This is in stark contrast to the government run, compulsory detox and reform-through-labor system that many addicts find themselves thrust into.

I was struck by the radical nature of Daytop Kunming’s initiatives and attitude. In a country as conservative as China, one rarely hears candid discussion of social ills like drug addiction. But the guests and employees at Daytop are frank about the issues. They talk freely and without shame as they relay horror stories of prison, infection, and death. In my work with Daytop Kunming I am humanizing the issue of addiction in China. China is often written-off as an abstract monolith, too far away and too foreign to be fully grasped by Western audiences. My work will provide an opportunity to understand and empathize with the darker corners of the “Chinese Miracle”.

Rian Dundon On behalf of Daytop Kunming