More than 373,500 drug addicts registered in Guangdong

Drug-related crimes have yet to be brought under control in Guangdong province, a senior provincial official has admitted.

Zhu Mingguo, deputy Party chief of Guangdong, said the southern province, which borders Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions, had registered more than 373,500 drug addicts by the end of June, bringing the population of drug addicts to more than one-sixth of the country's total.

Zhu made the remarks on Tuesday at the Guangdong Provincial Committee of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a conference he chaired on fighting drug-related crimes in Shanwei, Guangdong province.

Fifteen prefecture-level cities in the province have more than 10,000 registered drug addicts each, according to Zhu.

Zhu has urged police and relevant departments to continue to take effective and concrete measures to fight drug-related crimes in the city, which has become a distribution center and a transfer station of drugs in the Chinese mainland.

According to statistics from the Ministry of Public Security, more than 17 percent of heroin, 40 percent of "ice", a highly purified and potent form of Crystal Meth, and 60 percent of synthetic drugs in the country came from Guangdong in the last year.