Drugs, AIDS evade clampdown in India's northeast

Malsawmdawngu was just 14 when he began injecting a powerful painkiller and opiate into his veins because, he says, all his friends did. When he finally found out he was HIV-positive at 26, he almost went mad.

"I had stopped taking drugs by then, and I was thinking about my future," says the young man who lives in Mizoram state in remote northeastern India. "I began doing drugs again, I slept in the streets, wearing just rags. I had nothing, I had to steal just for food. I thought it was better to die."

Somehow, he found a way back. Today he sits in his living room with his wife, Irene, knife scars and tattoos all over his arms, but free from drugs and battling for a new life.

Last year he and Irene became the first people in Mizoram to go public that they were HIV-positive.

"There is still a lot of stigma but we are fighting it," he says. "People still point at us behind our backs, and say 'They are positive, stay away from them'."

EPIDEMIC

The forested hills and sleepy villages of Mizoram, sandwiched between Myanmar and Bangladesh, are home to a growing menace - rampant drug use, and rapidly spreading HIV and AIDS.

Official figures show the number of HIV sufferers increased five-fold in the past four years. But the 1,000 officially listed as HIV-positive are just the tip of the iceberg.

Surveys of pregnant women in Mizoram found almost 2 percent were HIV-positive. Among drugs users and sex workers, the rates are much higher, but awareness of the risks is dangerously low.

Mizoram, experts say, will soon become the seventh Indian state to admit it has a "generalised AIDS epidemic". Two of the others are also in the neglected northeast, where unemployment is close to 60 percent.

In the nearby state of Manipur, almost two in three intravenous drug-users are thought to be HIV-positive.

"If the trend goes on like this, there is going to be a big bang very soon," said Betty Lalthantluangi, an adviser to the Mizoram State AIDS Control Society.

"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."

Lalthantluangi said few people used condoms and efforts to encourage them to do so have drawn criticism in the overwhelmingly Christian state as promoting sex. "Sex workers are drunk most of the time, and it is very difficult to convince them to ask their clients to use condoms," she added.

For 20 years, Mizo rebels fought Indian rule. But with peace in 1986 came a new menace. Heroin began flooding in from Myanmar and quickly caught on in the capital, Aizawl, where long years of curfew had prevented any nightlife developing.