Addiction treatment in Vietnam – Beatings and forced labor

You’ll never think of Cashews in the same way after reading the first few pages of this recent report by the Human Rights Watch group that looked into the abuses in Vietnamese “drug treatment” centers.

The detainees in these facilities, whether they checked themselves in voluntarily or were committed after being arrested for using or possessing drugs, describe terrible conditions, hard forced labor, and extensions to sentences that make their experience seem much more like jail than any form of drug treatment. Indeed the report states that “no one who had been detained described any form of scientifically or medically appropriate drug dependency treatment within a center. Psychosocial counseling involved lectures on the evils of drug use and morning exercises while chanting slogans such as ‘Healthy! Healthy! Healthy!’ .”

It should be pretty obvious that relapse rates are extremely high since, as we’ve talked about numerous times here on A3, at least part of addiction involves compulsive behavior affected by biology and early experiences and therefore punishment alone will simply not work for true addicts… And still we put all of our addicts in jails and prisons with little actual drug treatment in our own country – I guess at least we don’t have forced labor.

Read this thing  by the Human Rights Watch group – it’ll leave you just a little speechless.