Chinese Kids Don't Do Drugs, Says Beijing

Beijing said on Friday that its efforts to crack down on drug use among young people have been so successful that the problem has essentially been eradicated from the nation's schools.

The announcement was made in a Xinhua News Agency article with a headline boasting of Chinese students being "immune to narcotics".

The Ministry of Public Security said the goal of seeing students and schools free from narcotics has basically been achieved, Xinhua reported.

It said the number of newly identified drug users under the age of 35 dropped 31.5 percent in 2020, compared to the year before.

Ministry official Li Xianhui was quoted as putting this achievement down to the fact that more than 98 million students at some 230,000 schools had received drug prevention education.

Another English-language Xinhua article, published less than a minute later, detailed how police had made a seizure of 250,000 methamphetamine pills in Yunnan, a province it said was a "major front in China's battle against drug crime".