Ex-drug addicts rebuild life at this firm
Print Edition
All employees at Jiang Haifeng’s company are former drug addicts.
From successful businessman to drug abuser and back to businessman again, heroin destroyed Jiang’s life, and now he just wants to help drug users rebuild their lives.
The quiet 40-year-old from Yongning County in northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region ran a brickyard before he became a heroin addict.
In the 1990s, Jiang, one of the county’s first millionaires, was introduced to the heroin by friends. “I was curious about the drugs at first but soon became addicted,” he recalled.
From then on, Jiang began an eight-year nightmare.
“At that time, I was spending 2,000 yuan (US$303) a day on drugs,” Jiang said. By the time he started to detox, his multimillion yuan assets had gone and his brickyard was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Not only did Jiang’s career go into freefall, but his family suffered, too. In less than half a year, Jiang’s 17-year-old daughter committed suicide and his father also died of depression.
Jiang’s wife and son also became drug users, and they went through compulsory isolation as drug rehabilitation. Jiang locked himself up at home in a desperate attempt to go cold turkey. “I would throw up whatever I ate and I shivered even if it was a hot summer day,” Jiang said. “Once I drove to the banks of the Yellow River, locked the car and just, endured it.”
“Ten days later, I could suddenly feel my appetite and was very hungry, and I knew I was almost there,” he added.
When Jiang succeeded in beating the addiction, he began to think about starting another business.
In 2016, he and his wife rented a place in Yongning County and started a business of tissue production, with the support of the county government’s anti-drug office.
Jiang decided to hire only former drug users to help them return to normal life.
Jiang said his company produces about 4,000 boxes of tissues a day, and has signed supply contracts with 86 enterprises, many of them introduced by his friends at the anti-drug office in Yongning.
Jiang Tao, an employee in the tissue company, was a county official before he took drugs. He went through drug rehabilitation three times, but each time he relapsed. In 2016, he joined Jiang Haifeng’s company and was in charge of farming the company’s 20 hectares of land.
The work has since kept the former farmer busy.
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