Drugs destroyed on anniversary

BEIJING, June 4 (UPI) -- Police in Beijing Wednesday set fire to huge quantities of drugs to mark a similar anti-drug event 170 years ago.

About 393 kilograms, or 865 pounds, of banned substances such as heroin, methamphetamine (ice), cocaine and marijuana were fed to the flames in observance of the June 3, 1839, Humen Opium Destruction, in which Lin Zexu, a senior official of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), ordered 1,000 tons of smuggled opium, confiscated from foreign dealers in China, to be burned in Humen in Guangdong province, China Daily reported.

The Humen event is marked as China's first battle against drugs.

The drugs for the Beijing event arrived in heavy security-escorted bullet-proof vehicles and were fed into an industrial furnace, the report said.

Separately on Wednesday, a memorial hall in honor of Lin was dedicated in the town of Fuzhou.

A three-year crackdown in Beijing ending in 2008 helped uncover nearly 14,000 cases of drug trafficking and in the arrests of more than 16,600 suspected dealers, police said.

Across the country, Chinese authorities in the past year handled 62,000 drug trafficking related cases and arrested about 74,000 suspects, the newspaper reported.

The drugs seized included 4.4 tons of heroin, 6.2 tons of "ice," 1 million "ecstasy" pills, 5.3 tons of ketamine, 2.2 tons of marijuana, 1.4 tons of opium and almost a ton of cocaine.

"In recent years, international drug traffickers have found new ways to smuggle drugs into Beijing. Sending drugs across borders via air mail is the latest trick up their sleeves," the deputy director of Beijing anti-drug committee told China Daily.