Finding Sobriety—and Jesus—in Vietnam’s Christian Drug Rehabs

In March 2013, the government-run drug rehab center in Hanoi released Hung Quang Pham early.

They didn’t want the bone-thin heroin user with AIDS to die in their facility.

But before Hung left, friends helped carry him to a Bible class held inside the rehab facility, and Christians told Hung about Jesus. He remembers a room full of jumping and singing, where men and women freed from their addictions praised God. Jesus offered joy, they said, and they told Hung how Jesus could rescue him from drugs—how he could heal his body and save his soul.

After Hung left rehab, he went home, laid in bed, and waited to die. Not long afterward, a pastor’s wife visited him and handed him a Bible. Hung started praying what he felt were impossible prayers, and God answered them, one after another. Hung got out of bed, suddenly able to walk. His body was healed.

Given a new lease on life, Hung volunteered with a Christian drug ministry, returning to the government rehab center to share his story. He found a wife, a woman who also had struggled with addiction. He was miraculously cured of HIV. And in 2021, despite being told they would never have children, Hung’s wife gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl.

Early last year, I drank bitter green tea with a healthy and grinning Hung under a gazebo in the yard of a small Christian drug rehab he was running. When we met, his ministry was helping 11 men who struggled with drug addiction and 6 orphaned boys.

“A hundred percent of the people who come here come in desperation,” Hung said. “The same way God healed and saved us, we are helping other brothers, directing them to trust God and introducing them to a relationship with Jesus.”(Hung has since relocated to Hanoi, and another Christian has taken over the rehab center.)

Each of the approximately 60 Christian drug rehab centers in Vietnam has miraculous stories like Hung’s—walking corpses rising into new life. The approach at these recovery centers is simple: Abstain from substances, read the Bible, and pray. But rehab leaders say their programs, infused with the love of the Christian staff and the power of the Holy Spirit, have helped thousands shed their addictions and become pastors, husbands, fathers, and contributing members of society. They say a revival is breaking out among the outcasts of Vietnamese society.

Even Vietnam’s communist government has noticed the transformation, especially as it struggles to curb drug use and rehabilitate users. As in many Southeast Asian countries, Vietnamese government-run compulsory treatment centers are rife with human rights abuses, including forced labor and torture. Almost everyone who completes treatment ends up back on drugs.

In contrast, the success of voluntary Christian rehabs, none of which are registered due to their religious affiliation, has the government curious: What are these Christians doing? And can they learn from them?

“God chose those people who are already rejected by society, those people who are nothing in man’s eyes, to reveal his glory,” said Nam Quoc Trung, Hung’s pastor and the founder of the Aquila Rescue Center, one of the largest Christian rehabs in Vietnam. “Right now, my life is sweeter than any billionaire’s life.”


Finding Sobriety—and Jesus—in Vietnam’s Christian Drug Rehabs

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Aquila Addiction Treatment Center rehab residents eat Mi noodles and Banh Cuon (steamed rice rolls) for breakfast in an open area between the kitchen and the dorms where longer term residents reside.

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An Aquila Addiction Treatment Center rehab residents uses chop sticks on Banh Cuon (steamed rice rolls) from a shared plate at a breakfast table above the dorms for recent arrivals.

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Staff member Hoang Viet Bao (center) leads morning worship outside the dorms for longer term residents at Aquila Addiction Treatment Center.

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Rehab residents rest on a hammock while others play Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) in the spatious retreat-like setting of the Aquila Addiction Treatment Center.

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Aquila Addiction Treatment Center rehab residents Nguyen Viet Huyen and Hoang Tien Manh play Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) outside the rehab dorms for new arrivals whilst other residents watch on.

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Since the 1950s, the mountainous region north of Vietnam where Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos meet, known as the Golden Triangle, has been one of the world’s top producers of opium and heroin. Much of it flows south through Vietnam on its way to other parts of the world. Much of it also stays in Vietnam.

All that supply made cheap heroin widely available in most Southeast Asian countries, triggering addiction epidemics there beginning in the 1960s and ’70s.

In the past two decades, drug syndicates have taken advantage of destabilized governments in the Golden Triangle, fueling production of synthetic drugs—principally methamphetamine. In 2021, authorities in Southeast and East Asia seized more than a billion methamphetamine pills.

To combat the narcotics crisis, many Southeast Asian countries have imposed stiff consequences for drug possession, including potential life imprisonment. In Singapore, people convicted of trafficking more than 15 grams of heroin can face the death penalty. In the Philippines, former president Rodrigo Duterte’s vicious war on drugs beginning in 2016 led to the deaths of more than 6,000 drug suspects as he encouraged extrajudicial killings.

Gloria Lai, Asia regional director of the International Drug Policy Consortium, said governments often politicize the issue of drugs to win elections. People also stigmatize all drug users as criminals or dangerous. 

“Drugs are framed as a social evil, and it’s blamed as the root cause of a lot of the problems that people see in society … crime, poverty, disorder, and chaos,” Lai said. “I think it’s a scapegoat, and it’s very easy to gain a political win.”

As a result, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam send suspected users to compulsory drug detention centers without their consent and often without due process or clinical evaluations.

Vietnam’s centers, established in 1992, are some of the harshest in the region, detaining children as young as 12.

A 2011 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report found that in such treatment centers, known as 06 centers, forced labor, torture, and abuse were common. Those suspected of addiction were often detained by police and then sent to detention centers. They were unable to leave and were required to perform “labor therapy,” often working in agricultural production, garment manufacturing, or construction work for meager pay. Over the years, hundreds of detainees have escaped the centers during mass breakouts.

One former detainee, Que Phong, said he was required to husk cashews for six or seven hours a day, his hands burning from the resin on the nuts. If he refused, he would be slapped, beaten, or sent to a “punishment room.” Although he had initially volunteered to be at the center for one year, he was unable to leave for five.

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Rehab resident, Bui Minh Quan (30 years old), does push ups at the outdoor gym at Aquila Addiction Treatment Center. While many rehab residents have problems with Methamphetamine, Quan is in rehab to address his problem with Marijuana. Having recently returned to Vietnam after a number of years spent abroad in New Zealand, Quan’s parents asked him to enter the rehab program so that he could get over his Marijuana dependence.

After his release, he returned to smoking and injecting heroin. “The time and work in the center didn’t help me,” he told HRW, which noted that the relapse rate in Vietnam’s compulsory centers was between 80 and 97 percent. Lai told me that the drug treatment centers have little incentive to actually get people clean, as they would then lose their cheap labor.

Besides perpetrating human rights abuses, the overcrowded centers have also spread HIV. In 2005, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, 40 percent of detainees were HIV positive and many had tuberculosis, according to the US State Department. Few centers have appropriate medical care for these diseases.

In 2012, the United Nations cited such concerns when it called for the closure of Vietnam’s more than 100 compulsory drug detention and rehabilitation centers. Vietnam’s government vowed to reduce the use of 06 centers and increase the number of community-based voluntary treatment centers.

But within a few years, faced with skyrocketing methamphetamine use and one of the highest rates of opioid-related deaths in East and Southeast Asia, the country backpedaled on its commitment. The government doubled down on the use of 06 centers, opening or reopening dozens of them between 2014 and 2018.

Jim and Kathie Lowans, the Asia Pacific regional directors of Global Teen Challenge, said that while participants in their Christian drug rehabilitation program do have to work, the work is accompanied by discipleship, life-skills training, counseling, prayer, and Bible study. Studies of Teen Challenge programs in the United States have found them to have a 67–86 percent success rate in keeping graduates clean. Teen Challenge staff and participants often call it “the Jesus factor.”

In Southeast Asia, Teen Challenge opened its first program in Singapore in 1976, then another program in the Philippines in 1988. A partner asked the Lowanses to help start a rehab center in Cambodia in 2005. Since then, Teen Challenge has opened 12 more programs in the region. 

Kathie Lowans believes voluntary Christian drug rehabs work better than mandatory centers because they make theological sense. “God gave us a choice: Choose this day whom you will serve and Today I am giving you a choice between life and death. We must give others a choice,” she said. “The desire to change must come from within, not from someone’s mandate. Following his model gives a better and lasting result.”

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75 year old, Nguyen Dinh Ha, reads the bible in his dorm room. Ha is the oldest member of the Born Again Family Rescue Center community and he came to the center to address his addiction to alcohol. He first came to the center in 2021 but after graduating in 2023 he had difficulty staying away from alcohol on return to his home town so he has returned.

The founding father of Christian drug treatment in Vietnam is arguably pastor Ngo Tan Si.

Amid Vietnam’s drug problem—and lack of good solutions—Ngo felt God call him in 1996 to minister to those caught in the cycle of drug addiction. He said that God spoke to him, saying, “The things man cannot do, God
can do.”

The son of a pastor, Ngo had left the Christian faith as a teen after seeing how religion had left his family impoverished and kept him from going to university. (A teacher had warned him that, because the Vietnamese government viewed pastors like his father with suspicion, he would not be admitted to a public university.)

Depressed, Ngo started drinking, smoking, and doing drugs. Soon he was spending all his time and money searching for his next high. His distraught father considered resigning from the pastorate. His mother would cry all night. “My family looked like they were at a funeral,” Ngo told me.

In 1984, Ngo was returning home after a night of drinking when he started feeling ill. He collapsed on the road, unconscious. Friends found him hours later and brought him home, unable to wake him. Ngo’s father, who was also a doctor, checked his vitals; Ngo was almost dead. His mother pleaded with God for his life, convinced that if he died, he would go to hell.

Then Ngo woke up.

Ngo remembers sensing his end was near and, for the first time, fearing death. He recalled his father’s preaching and prayed that if God would save him, he would follow him the rest of his life. Two days later, Ngo says, he had an encounter with Jesus in his room where Jesus showed him all the sin in his life. Ngo knelt and cried, seeing his desperate need for salvation.

A few days later, when his old friends came by offering a cigarette and a drink, he felt God telling him to say he didn’t know how to smoke or drink. His friends thought he was crazy and left.

Ngo considers that experience to be the moment of his conversion. “I feel that I had overcome sin and since then I’ve been a Christian,” he said.

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Pastor Ngo Tan Si sits on one of the bunks in a small room behind the church they they call the delivery room. When addicts arrive at the center they spend their first 7-10 days in this room while they endure withdrawal symptoms. During their time in the room, 2 staff members stay with them 24 hours a day.

For the next 12 years, Ngo wondered why God had allowed him to go through such a painful experience. Then he heard the call to start a drug ministry, he says, and he began to understand God’s plan. He reached out to those using drugs who had HIV. His friend, who worked in the government fighting HIV, invited Ngo to teach the Bible to around 80 men struggling with addiction.

At first, his audience seemed more interested in taking smoke breaks or getting coffee than listening to his preaching. But on the third day, as he preached, he was shocked when they began crying and praying. Twenty men accepted the Lord that day, Ngo says, and his addiction-deliverance ministry was born.

Working with his church, Ngo tried housing some men in Ho Chi Minh City. But the urban environment offered too powerful a temptation to return to drugs. A Christian offered his home two hours outside the city, so Ngo moved 15 men there, opening a new center in Bình Long now called the Born Again Family Rescue Center. When they lost the church’s funding, Ngo turned to the men’s families to pay for their rehabilitation. Today, most of Vietnam’s Christian drug rehabs rely on fees paid by families.

In the 1990s, before Vietnam had access to antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV, many of the men Ngo served, whom he called his students, passed away. He remembers one month when five men in his ministry died.

Still, Ngo pressed on. Some students found deliverance from their addictions, became Christians, and went on to start their own rehab ministries. Others got clean and then relapsed. Some went through his program multiple times. Some left and never returned.

One student, angry about some relationship advice Ngo had given him, followed Ngo into the center’s chapel with a knife, threatening to “chop [him] into three pieces.” The man tripped and fell about 10 feet from him, the knife clattering to the sanctuary floor. Later, during a worship service, the tearful student asked Ngo and God for forgiveness.

Ngo said the differences between public rehab centers and his are vast. Nearly everyone who came through his doors had been in government-run rehabs or prison; some had been sentenced to up to 30 years. I asked Ngo what portion of his students stay clean after finishing the program. He said about 30 percent are “solid and strong” now.

“The Christian rehab is all about love,” he said. “It has the power of the Holy Spirit, the truth that is the Word of God, and also the preaching of the changing of the mind. But in the government-run rehabs, there’s always [people] fighting, hating each other, and filling their minds with desires of the flesh. They feel revenge, bitterness, and unhealed wounds.”

Once a new arrival to Ngo’s rehab detoxes from drugs and acclimates to the schedule, the staff prays for deliverance in areas where the person is struggling. It’s about finding healing not only from their drug addiction, Ngo says, but also in other areas of bondage, such as unforgiveness, anger, sexual sin, or unclean spirits.

Unlike compulsory centers, Vietnam’s Christian rehabs have no barbed wire fences or locked gates to keep people in. Students can walk away if they choose. “There is [only] a fence in your mind,” Ngo said. He wants participants to know “that the center of God is not a prison.”

Students are told the rehab center is run as a Christ-ian ministry and they’re welcome whether or not they become Christians.

“We very much respect their free choice,” Ngo said. “We want to let them receive and see the presence of the Lord through older members in the rehab by the way they talk, deal with new members, and especially their love for one another.”

 Transformation doesn’t stop with the men who join the center. Many parents, after suffering for years watching their children waste away from addiction, witness their sons’ transformations and put their faith in Jesus. Ngo, who often connects churches with students’ families, found that if a student’s relatives come to faith, there is a much higher likelihood the student will stay clean after finishing the program.

This is part of Ngo’s larger goal of sending students out with a vision: God changed me. God changed you. God can change anybody. Go save other drug addicts.

Of Vietnam’s 60 Christian drug rehabs, which range in size from a handful of participants to more than 100, Ngo estimates that half were started by his former students.

Finding Sobriety—and Jesus—in Vietnam’s Christian Drug Rehabs

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Nguyen Tri An and other Born Again Family Rescue Center members read the bible in their dorms at dawn.

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Hoang Cao Nguyen Vu stands in front of the church at the Born Again Family Rescue Center. The church is often overcrowded so the long term goal is build a bigger church that can seat up to 500 people.

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Born Again Family Rescue Center members wash their dishes in an open area at the rear of the center.

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Pastor Ngo Tan Si (left) sings during morning worship in the church at Born Again Family Rescue Center.

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Ngo’s vision has spread not only in southern Vietnam, where Christianity long been centered, but also in the north, the country’s historic seat of atheistic communism. Ngo says Christian drug rehabs are reaching families of government workers in and around the capital of Hanoi. After communist Vietnamese forces won the Vietnam War in 1975, the divided country was reunified and political power consolidated in Hanoi. As Ngo tells it, many in the north were given high-paying government jobs that allowed their kids to live carefree postwar lives. Children took up cheap and easily accessible recreational drugs. Many became addicted, and their parents grew desperate.

“God allowed this to happen to let the love of God enter [northern Vietnam],” Ngo said. “Only through the children who are addicts and in gangs and only through the deliverance from drug addictions through the power of Jesus’ blood … have a lot of government workers become saved.”

One of these wayward children was Nam, the founder of the Aquila Center and a former student of Ngo’s. As a young man, Nam’s single-minded pursuit of heroin led him to theft. He stole and sold his parents’ assets. Once, he held his month-old daughter hostage until his wife and mother gave him money for drugs.

“I was like an animal,” Nam said. He did more than a dozen stints in government treatment centers, relapsing each time.

Then in 2006, Nam ran into a friend he used to shoot up with. The man was happy and sober. He told Nam that he had gone to a Christian drug rehab and that the love of Jesus had rescued him. Nam decided to check himself into Ngo’s Bình Long center. Soon he found himself devouring the Bible and asking God for forgiveness. For the first time, he was free.

It was a new beginning. All his family soon came to Christ. Nam became a pastor and started a Christian drug rehab of his own. His parents pooled money to build a six-story building in Hanoi for churches to use and to house women addicted to drugs (the building was later sold to build a separate women’s rehab facility). Local government persecution forced Nam to shutter the rehab’s first location, but he soon gained the confidence of Hanoi officials and found himself invited back to the government treatment centers where he was once detained to share how Jesus set him free from addiction. Over a four-year period, Nam shared the gospel with 20,000 people in the rehab centers—including Hung—and launched Bible classes in several centers.

In 2015, Nam also built a new drug rehab center in Quôc Oai, a district of verdant hills an hour west of Hanoi. Today, the Aquila Center is a spacious, retreat-like property that sits beside a lake. It has a K–12 Christian boarding school, worship hall, kitchen, soccer field, swimming pool, and dormitories for 200 staff, students, and rehab clients—who call each other “brothers” and “sisters.”

On a cool January morning, the Aquila Center was bustling with the sounds of guitar strumming, chatter, and the chirping of pet birds. High school students, winter coats over their uniforms, trudged up the steps at Aquila Dream Academy, an unregistered Christian school. Their days begin with student-led worship, a short message, and testimonies. Then they sit at workspaces and leaf through self-paced lesson books, with teachers stopping by to assist when they get stuck.

Down a hill, worship music flowed from a chapel where about 100 men were swaying, clapping, and raising their hands as they sang. It was Wednesday, the day the brothers spend entirely in chapel sessions and Bible classes taught by visiting missionaries. Some brothers seclude themselves for the morning in personal “prayer caves” under the outdoor gym, where they bend over their Bibles at low tables.

Finding Sobriety—and Jesus—in Vietnam’s Christian Drug Rehabs

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The sun rises above the surrounding verdent hills to strike the spatious retreat-like setting of the Aquila Addiction Treatment Center and a neighbouring construction site.

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Pastor Nam Quoc Trung at the entrance of a rehab dorm where the most recent arrivals reside at Aquila Addiction Treatment Center.

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Rehab residents at Aquila Addiction Treatment Center partake in a mixture of activities in the dorms for new arrivals as some discuss and study the Bible while others practice guitar or sit in prayer or reflection.

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Former rehab resident, Vang Thi Lam Cam, chats with current rehab resident Luu Thi Thuan in the dorm that she slept in when she was a resident at Priscilla. Cam has recently found a job in Hanoi and is now living in the city with her husband, another former addict whom she met through the Aquila Addiction Treatment Center.

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Priscilla rehab resident, Nong Thi Tap, worships during a youth conference at the Aquila Addiction Treatment Center chapel.

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Pastor Nam Quoc Trung sounds a shofar during worship at a youth conference at the Aquila Addiction Treatment Center chapel.

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A short motorbike ride from the men’s rehab is the newly built Priscilla Center, a purple-and-white building housing roughly 30 women struggling with addiction. It’s one of the few Christian facilities that serve women. In Vietnam’s patriarchal society, parents often fight to help a son overcome drugs but may simply give up on a daughter who becomes addicted, Nam said. Many such women turn to prostitution.

It took Vang Thi Lam Cam six years to graduate from the Priscilla Center. Born into a poor family in central Vietnam, Vang told me her life started to fall apart after her parents divorced and her mother remarried a violent, abusive man. Eager to leave her home life behind, Vang moved away and studied to become a teacher. She started partying, drinking heavily, and earning extra income singing at bars. Then she fell in love.

She moved with her boyfriend to Hanoi. There, she learned that he and his friends were smoking heroin. Curious, she tried it herself and began using regularly. When a few friends confronted her, telling her that she had a drug problem, she pushed back at first. Then she realized they were right.

“I was so disappointed,” Vang said. “I felt so fearful and I didn’t want to live anymore. In my mind, if you’re an addict, the only way out is to die.”

Thin, weak, and exhausted, Vang tried to kill herself by overdosing. Then she started selling. She cycled in and out of government rehabs. There, in 2013, she heard Nam preach for the first time.

“I was so desperate and disappointed at myself, but at the same time I still wanted to live a good life,” Vang said. “From that moment on, hope started racing in my heart and I began to pray.”

She knew she had to cut ties with her old life, so upon release from government rehab in 2016, Vang immediately called Nam and joined the women’s program at the Aquila Center. Despite challenges—she had a fiery temper and clashed with the other women—Vang persevered. Now sober for 11 years, Vang said she’s grown and matured in her faith. “I don’t think about drugs,” she said.

Today, she’s married to a man who went through the Aquila Center’s program, and she mentors incoming women. She said she sees her younger self in them and listens patiently to their stories. As she develops more of a relationship with them, she encourages them through the Word of God.

At Aquila, stories like Vang’s are more the rule than the exception. In a government study, 100 percent of surveyed program graduates reported they had stopped using drugs. The large majority said they had found purpose in their lives, were more in control of themselves, and had more confidence. “People are amazed,” Nam said. “They can’t deny we are walking with God and what we are doing is working.”

Finding Sobriety—and Jesus—in Vietnam’s Christian Drug Rehabs

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Aquila Addiction Treatment Center rehab residents participate in an early morning worship session outside the rehab dorms for new arrivals.

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Aquila Addiction Treatment Center rehab resident Do Van Hung cuts the hair of Ho David outside the rehab dorms for new arrivals.

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Aquila Addiction Treatment Center rehab resident, Nguyen Truong Giang, with his eyes on the shuttlecock during a game of badminton with Aquila Dream Academy students.

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Those stats have Vietnamese officials coming to visit the Aquila Center and meeting with Nam. Police officers and government workers have sent their children to Aquila’s school and referred their relatives to Aquila instead of compulsory treatment centers.

“Personally, they know for sure the differences [between the two] and the effectiveness of Christian rehab centers,” Nam said. He is often invited to speak to police groups and share how he’s rehabilitated many people addicted to drugs. In every meeting, he says, he speaks about the root of their success: the power of Jesus.

Despite their track records, Aquila and other Vietnamese Christian rehabs are still not recognized by the government as legal treatment centers because of their openness about their faith. They operate instead as unregistered church ministries, which bars them from receiving grants or donations from businesses. That status also limits how they can market themselves. When Vietnamese media cover the Aquila Center, they edit out any mention of God in interviews.

There are signs, though, that government attitudes may be changing. Two denominations, including the Pentecostal group that sponsors Aquila and 13 other Christian drug rehabs, received legal status in 2023. Nam believes these developments will make it easier for the centers to receive their own government recognition.

In December 2023, officials invited Nam and members of Aquila to Quang Tri, a district along the Laos border and a hotspot for drug trafficking. During a gathering where Nam shared about the ministry, he said, 100 people came forward to receive Christ. And 40 from the district have come to Aquila to get clean.

“We see the big need for people in that area,” he said. “When I came to the area, God spoke to me that he’s going to use the weak to put shame on the strong in this world. And in that place that is full of darkness, God will show his glory.”

Angela Lu Fulton is Southeast Asia editor for Christianity Today.

The post Finding Sobriety—and Jesus—in Vietnam’s Christian Drug Rehabs appeared first on Christianity Today.