Drugs, AIDS Evade Clampdown in India's Northeast

Mizoram state in remote northeast India is being affected by heavy drug use and the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS. The official figure of HIV-infected persons has grown five-fold during four years to reach 1,000. Yet surveys of pregnant women in the state found that almost 2 percent were HIV-positive. Rates among drug users and sex workers are much higher.

Experts say Mizoram will soon become the seventh India state to admit it has a generalized AIDS epidemic. Two other such states are also in the northeast, where unemployment runs close to 60 percent. Two of three IV drug users are thought to be HIV-positive in nearby Manipur. "The disease is spreading from high-risk to non-high-risk people. It is spilling over to the general public, and there is no way to control it," said Betty Lalthantluangi, an adviser to the Mizoram State AIDS Control Society. Few people in Mizoram use condoms; efforts to promote their use in the overwhelmingly Christian state are seen as promoting sex.

Under pressure from the church, the state banned alcohol in 1996. Health workers, however, say this prohibition may fuel the use of other drugs. When 20 years of rebel-backed fighting ended in 1986, heroin from neighboring Myanmar flooded Mizoram. When anti-drug efforts drove up the price of heroin, many users switched to the prescription painkiller Spasmo Proxyvon (SP). But the powder inside the SP capsules is not soluble: It sticks to the inside of the veins, leading to abscesses and amputations. Drugs killed at least 142 people in Mizoram last year.

The Young Mizo Association, founded by Welsh missionaries in 1935, boasts more than 350,000 members -- a third of the state's population -- and is fighting drug dealers and bootleggers, as is the more extreme, and violent, Mizo Tlang Via. The English-language Newslink is fighting an unpopular campaign against the groups' actions, which it says will just drive the problem deeper underground.

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