China's War on Drugs

[Randy W]

They came for Jiang Ruiyang on Sept. 2. Ten police officers burst into the factory where he was working in north China’s Shanxi province, told him he was being detained on drugs-related charges, and marched him across the shop floor in handcuffs.

The 25-year-old’s crime: buying a few boxes of Ritalin on the internet.

Similar scenes have played out across China in recent months, as hundreds of people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have become unexpected targets in the country’s war on drugs.

from the Sixth Tone on Facebook 
https://www.facebook.com/sixthtone/posts/3105177809801058

In China, People Are Risking Everything for a Box of Ritalin
For years, Chinese adults with ADHD have struggled to access vital medication. Now, they’re also being ensnared in the country’s war on drugs.

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They came for Jiang Ruiyang on Sept. 2. Ten police officers burst into the factory where he was working in north China’s Shanxi province, told him he was being detained on drugs-related charges, and marched him across the shop floor in handcuffs.

The 25-year-old’s crime: buying a few boxes of Ritalin on the internet.

Similar scenes have played out across China in recent months, as hundreds of people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have become unexpected targets in the country’s war on drugs.

 . . .

Stimulants like Ritalin, Concerta, and Adderall are strictly controlled in China, and anyone found buying them illegally can be prosecuted for drug trafficking. Patients like Jiang are effectively being forced to risk a prison sentence to protect their health.

“I still can’t figure out why they did this to me,” says Jiang, who spoke with Sixth Tone using a pseudonym for privacy reasons. “I’m just sick, but they treated me like a criminal.”

Though there’s a widely held assumption in China that ADHD only affects children, millions of Chinese adults have the condition. Lu Zheng, director of clinical psychiatry at the Shanghai Mental Health Center and a specialist who helped draft China’s clinical guidelines for adult ADHD, says the prevalence among Chinese adults is 2.8% — roughly consistent with the global average.

But the epidemic is almost entirely invisible. China’s health system has no designated centers for diagnosing and treating adult ADHD, and Lu estimates only 5% to 10% of Chinese adults with the disorder receive a diagnosis.