Drugs are pouring out of Burma into a booming China. With cash to spend and a rocketing drug culture, it's a social and legal time bomb.

Part I


Heroin and other dangerous drug traffic is pouring out of a newly unshackled Myanmar and into a booming, cashed-up China. As the country's drug culture sky-rockets, the narcotics are threatening social chaos.

China is now a major international supplier of precursor chemicals for the manufacture of the frightening and ruinous drug Ice and other new-generation drugs. "The quickest way to make a fortune is to deal drugs - to sell drugs here", Professor Wu Jiang tell us. This report takes us right into the heart of the illicit tearaway trade on the Myanmar border, where drugs flow through in huge quantities.

Part II


But for the Chinese it's not just the through traffic of drugs that's worrying. "The number of drug dealers doesn't seem to change much, but there are many more drug users", a Chinese man on the border explains. In the super-cities like Shanghai, unlike previous generations China's partying young are driving a booming market in so-called recreational drugs. It has become, "fun and fashionable to take drugs".

One credible report estimates the number of registered drug addicts has grown from 70,000 in 1990 to nearly 2 million a year ago. The number of regular drug users may be as high as 12 million. If it continues to grow exponentially, it's a social, health and legal time bomb for the Chinese authorities.

Get unprecedented access to China's drug cops at a key checkpoint near the Myanmar/China border where they're in full flight. Pulling over cars and buses targeting suspicious characters and unlikely drug mules alike.

On one tour bus that's just crossed in from what we used to call Burma, the team clambers aboard checking bags, compartments and asking rapid-fire questions. Soon a woman with a young child emerges with the officers. She's carrying a plastic shopping bag containing a handful of condoms filled with Ice -- the super-charged methamphetamine that's infiltrating China's party scene and that's being shipped out to more lucrative international destinations like Australia.