03 March 2003 :

The trial of twenty five defendants in the largest drug trafficking ring to be detected in Vietnam's northern mountainous Lai Chau province began. Of these four already were sentenced to death in other drug trafficking, weapons and murder cases.
According to the charges against them, from 1996 to August 2001, the defendants trafficked 251 cakes of heroin (89.65kg) from Laos to the province and then on to Hanoi, Quang Ninh and Hung Yen, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars and billions of dong. The head of the ring, Vuong Don, illegally traded 44 cakes of heroin. The trial is expected to last 12 days.
Vietnam has one of the world's toughest penalties for drug trafficking, Anyone caught trafficking upwards of 600g of heroin faces the death penalty.
Over the past five years, Vietnamese courts have handed down 931 death sentences, over half of these were for drug-related crimes.