（DCS系统）和（机器人系统）及（大型伺服控制系统）备件大卖！叫卖！特卖！卖卖卖！
WALKING into the activity room with his usual benumbed face, David Chen was stunned to see a birthday cake on his table. Social workers and fellow recovering drug addicts burst into a birthday song. The 43-year-old man broke into tears.

Chen’s birthday coincided with one of the rehabilitation center’s regular “companion education” days. Beyond the usual counseling from volunteers and talks from reformed addicts, the simple party produced instant therapeutic effects.

“It is the first time my birthday was celebrated since I became an addict years ago,” Chen said. “It has been so long since I felt that I was alive again.”

Indeed, Chen’s shell started to crack that day.

Once passive in group discussions, he started to talk more. He became forthcoming about his mental and physical condition. He wrote to social workers about a renewed determination to kick his habit. And he tried to buck up fellow patients when they became depressed about their situations.

“Drug abusers are not incurable, even if that is the way they are often regarded,” says Jin Weijing, a worker at Shanghai Ziqiang Social Services, which organized the “companion education” program.

“Everybody has a soft inside, no matter how indifferent they pretend to be. My job is not to provide light to their lives but to clean up the dust that obscures their own lights,” she says.

Ziqiang Social Services is the first non-governmental organization on the Chinese mainland to provide support to rehabilitating addicts. It has helped more than 30,000 drug abusers since it began work in 2003.

Its services include helping the rehabilitated addicts get income allowances, finding them jobs and, more importantly, providing ongoing counseling and support as they seek to re-enter mainstream life.

Still, it’s an uphill battle. Only about 26.5 percent of the addicts successfully quit drugs without a relapse for three years or more.

Jin, who became an anti-drug social worker in 2014, herself knows the agony of the struggle. She was a drug abuser until the Ziqiang Social Services helped her quit 10 years ago. Hers is a success story when you look at an average first-year relapse rate of 90 percent globally.

Today is International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking — a reminder to everyone of the huge task at hand.

According to Shanghai Narcotics Control Office, there are 85,045 recorded drug addicts in Shanghai today, 4.6 percent more than a year ago. About two-thirds of them are registered local residents, and just over a third are 35 years or younger.

Government-run drug rehabilitation centers and voluntary addiction rehabilitation hospitals are there to help addicts during their two-year compulsory treatment. Social workers come into play when recovering addicts are released from that treatment.

Although it takes only about 7-10 days to complete physiological detoxification, it takes much longer, probably years, to conquer the physical and psychological pull of drug-taking, according to Li Jimin, director-general of Ziqiang Social Services.

That is a crucial time when social work can be the pivot between success and failure.