"Sunshine Project" – A New Guizhou Model: A Solution to Worldwide Drug Rehabilitation Challenges or Not? (2)

Duyun: enjoys earliest start in development and may choose diversified “Sunshine Enterprises”

Duyun gains a very superior advantage in traffic location as the earliest place accessing to highways and railways in Guizhou province. It can be called an “inland dock”. Despite economic development and talent gathering, such an advantage also brings pressure on social administration. It becomes a must-be path for the international drug trafficking organization’s smuggling and trafficking activities because of its position on the golden paths connecting Yunan, Guizhou, Sichuan and Chongqing to Guangdong, Guangxi, Hunan, Hubei and east China regions. What’s more, Duyun was planned to be built into a new type of industrial city of Guizhou province as early as the 1980s, which gave birth to a mass of machinery, textile and military enterprises. However, almost all these enterprises went into quagmires and fell in (risk of) shut-down or semi-shutdown, or even bankruptcy, leaving the workers facing to be laid-off. Such economic bottlenecks plus special geographical conditions contributed to considerable pressures on public security management and caused drugs out of control.

In May 2005, Duyun was listed among the 17 cities and/or counties under the most severe narcotics situations for having over 1,000 drug users. To remove this embarrassing title, Duyun has created a humane and sustainable anti-drug method through continuous exploration and put “Loving Care Project” into practice, and built the “Loving Care Baseball Factory” (Later renamed to be “Sunshine Product Processing Plant”). Duyun is the place where the “Sunshine Project” originated and emerged. Its experience was promoted to the entire Guizhou province thereafter.

There are 399 drug users who have rehabilitated over and for 3 years from 2006 to late 2011, a significant progress compared with only six over the last one to two decades, remarking the effectiveness of this new model. Duyun broke away from that list in 2009.

Its specific approach is to integrate social resources into a unified mechanism by having the government play a leading role while taking the plant as a tool supplemented by other means of health care. According to Hu Xiaojian, mayor of Duyun, the government must bear the major responsibility in narcotics control and relief of drug users, in terms of funding or staffing, and fulfill its duty to provide quality public services through innovative social administration. For example, the government made a lump-sum investment of more than 300,000 Yuan in renting and building venues, offered vocational training and job placement, and contacted the baseball factories, kind of labor-intensive plants. However, these plants couldn't afford their operation if entirely run in line with the laws of the market because the production efficiency of the rehabilitated is generally 50 percent or lower than the normal due to their far poorer personal physical conditions. In view of this fact, Duyun government encourages such special workers to work according to their capacities and instructs the enterprises to pay them salaries for every baseball they've made in line with the normal value, leaving the missing part in the productivity to be subsidized by the government. Therefore, the rehabilitated can get physiological and psychological exercise and a sense of accomplishment. Besides, the government also integrated the forces from public security department, health sector and other agencies to ensure the normal operation of the plants by means of carrying out Red-Ribbon activities in the baseball factories, setting up methadone treatment sites and allocating full-time anti-drug officials, etc.
These factories receive not only rehabilitated drug users but also AIDS patients, separating them into different sub-workshops under centralized management. This is the most shining feature of Duyun’s “Sunshine Project”. Those who used to take drugs and are now suffering from AIDS may encounter more public prejudice. So Duyun government has intensified the efforts to enforce the performance of free methadone treatment to this group and give them more support in financial subsidies and personal caring.