Ben Tre: Meetings for World AIDS Day in some districts

Thousands of people, including office workers, Youth Union members, students and others attended large gartherings yesterday, June 26, in central towns of two separate districts of Ben Tre province.

The meetings were organized by local authorities in charge of HIV/AIDS fighting of Cho Lach and Mo Cay Nam districts.

Drug abuse is considered a social catastrophe. It hinders the development of human society as well as individual members. It makes individual’s life depraved, and generations of young people in the country may get lost. It even depraves our cultural and social values.

A surveillance of drug abuse in Ben Tre has shown that most of the addicts are in the range between 18 and 35 years of age. And many of them are students, farm workers, the homeless and even young people from well-off families.

At the gartherings, local authorities called for people of various parts of the social life to take part in the fight against drug smuggling and abuse among young people in the local community.

The district’s drug fighting have produced positive results over the past years. The number of drug addicts have been reduced to some extent, thus helping to tackle the problem of drug abusing.

The most important part in the drug fighting is to prevent the development of new addicts in the community.

To do this, levels of government, especially local administrations, are called for to push strongly the work of propaganda to every resident in an administrative commune or area.

It is a strong propaganda operation that effectively pushes the drug fightivng cause to the successful end in Viet Nam in general, and in Ben Tre province in particular. A strong propaganda operation can raise people’s awareness and consciousness about the drug catastrophe and the need to prevent it, to wipe out the greatest threat to our society. People’s awareness is especially useful in restricting and reducing the number of drug crimes and criminals, a core part to successful drug fighting.

Not less important is a collective endeavor by the whole political system as well as the social community to carry out comprehensive measures that have been agreed to, to control and supervise drug-addicted youth, and then to assist and re-direct them back into our social life.

After the gartherings, a big crowd of comrades, office workers, members of the Youth Union and students took part in parades through town centers and village concretized roads to mobilize local people to join the fight and wipe drug abuse out of our social life, to join hand to make our world “a sound place without drug abuse”.

Editing and translating into English by Truong Hung, with news contributions in Vietnamese by Hoa Phuong from Mo Cay Nam District and Viet Cuong from Cho Lach District.