Beijing - The opening of a regional highway from Bangkok through Laos to south-western China's Yunnan province has encouraged more traffickers to try smuggling drugs into China, state media said Friday.

Yunnan police and border forces have increased spot checks and used more mobile checkpoints while trying not to disrupt traffic along the highway, the government's Xinhua news agency quoted provincial security officials as saying.

"Since the Kunming-Bangkok Road was completed last year, we have arrested many suspects trying to smuggle drugs to China," Gong Huawu, the deputy head of provincial border troops, said at a meeting with officials from northern Laos this week.

"As trade and personnel exchanges between the two countries increase, we will be facing much heavier anti-drug pressures," Gong said.

Yunnan has long, porous borders with Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, which are straddled by South-East Asia's notorious Golden Triangle of drug production and smuggling.

The province has China's highest rate of drug use and drug-related crime.

The government said heroin, methamphetamines and opium recovered in Yunnan last year accounted for 67 per cent, 33 per cent and 92 per cent of the national total, respectively.

Yunnan has 20 official border crossings and more than 90 roads to foreign countries, the newspaper said.

"The international drug-smugglers usually collect a certain amount of drugs along the border and then transport them to China by highway," it quoted another unidentified provincial security official as saying.

After declaring its latest "people's war on drugs" at the start of last year, Yunnan police had handled 18,727 drug-related cases by the end of May, questioning 22,040 suspects.

The province has prosecuted 59 traffickers accused of involvement in major cross-border drug-smuggling cases, the provincial government said.

Courts across China have executed or sentenced to death dozens of drug traffickers in recent days to mark Friday's UN-sponsored international anti-drugs day.

They include two men who were executed in north-eastern China for leading a gang which smuggled heroin from Myanmar.

Chinese officials work inside Myanmar to share their knowledge of developing alternative crops to opium poppies, and Chinese police have launched dozens of cross-border anti-drugs operations with Myanmar's military in recent years.

"We also need to educate villagers to prevent drug addiction and raise their awareness of fighting drug crimes," the agency quoted Yunnan police official Hang Guojian as saying. (dpa)