Gao Hu, who had a small role in as a soldier in Zhang Yimou's 2011 movie The Flowers of War and this year's Man From Macao, was detained on Tuesday by police for possession and use of marijuana and methamphetamine.

The actor is just the latest celebrity caught up in a China-wide crack-down mandated by President Xi Jinping, who proclaim illegal drugs should be wiped out and that offenders would be severely punished. Novelist Chen Wanning, whose pen name is Ning Caishen, and director Zhang Yuan, who made Little Red Flowers in 2006, have also been reprimanded. Wanning tested positive for methamphetamine, officials said. Both men were held for 15 days.

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Illegal drug use is on the rise in China, whose newly flush middle and upper classes are dabbling in substances long known in the affluent West. Recent Chinese drug-busts include hauls of the  party drugs Ecstasy and ketamine (a horse tranquilizer) suggesting the problem is well-established, as are drug routes and production sites.

As with their American counterparts, Chinese law officers are finding methamphetamine, also known as meth or crystal, is proving particularly hard to stamp out, owing to its ease of production. The first five months of 2014 saw 39,762 people sentenced for drug-related offences up more than a quarter from the previous year, according to figures from the Supreme People's Court. 

While China as long grappled with opium and heroine, those to drugs are mostly restricted to the rural poor and unemployed. The rise of meth, Ecstacy, and ketamine, also called Special K, are hallmarks of richer populations. 

"When it comes to new types of drugs, the momentum is growing, like the situation in many countries of the world,"  Liu Yuejin, director general of the public security ministry's narcotics control bureau, said last year at a news conference. "The use and the selling of new types of drugs is on an upward trajectory."