Pubdate: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 Source: Tampa Tribune (FL) Copyright: 2000, The Tribune Co. Contact: http://www.tampatrib.com/ Forum: http://tampabayonline.net/interact/welcome.htm Author: Will Weissert, Associated Press GLUE ADDICTION RAVAGES HONDURAN KIDS TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - Glue Addiction Is Rampant Among The City's Youths, Robbing Them Of Their Health And Senses When Cesar Ulices Padilla beds down on the streets of Honduras' capital, he lulls himself to sleep sniffing from a baby food jar tucked under his nose. The jar contains industrial-strength shoe glue, and like nearly all the 1,500 street kids in this hilly city, he is addicted to it. ``There would be no way to make it through a night without it,'' the 18- year-old says. ``That's why we live now. We live for the glue.'' The adhesive's fumes shock the nervous system and render the senses useless for up to eight hours - making hunger, cold, loneliness and pain fade. But the chemicals also cause irreversible brain, lung and kidney damage, leaving slack-jawed, glassy-eyed addicts stumbling through their lives, unable to comprehend even the simplest aspects of the world around them. Street children sniff glue across Latin America. But nowhere are things as bad as in Honduras, especially in the two years since Hurricane Mitch killed 11,000 people and left at least 1.5 million homeless. ``I WOULD USE COCAINE sometimes, but it seems too weak after you use glue,'' says 17-year-old Carlos Javier Martinez, a panhandler who sniffed glue for six years. He says he gave it up when two of his friends starved to death after scorning the idea of buying food for weeks, preferring instead to pool their money for jars of glue four times a day. ``We've got crack and weed here, but they just aren't strong enough for most of us like the glue is,'' Carlos says. Many street kids have become all but oblivious to the world around them, building an independent rhythm fueled by glue. Ten-year-old Carlos Enrique, who begs for money by opening cab doors for passengers, dances in his threadbare black-and-silver Pumas sneakers to imagined music every time he pulls his head out of a plastic bag filled with yellow globs of glue. ``It makes me feel like I am a superman, like I am better than anyone,'' he says, spewing a cloud of glue-stinking breath from lips stained yellow by glue residue. Beside him, Jose Luis Zuazo, 15, puts his baby food jar aside long enough to show off the gruesome scars on his chest from a pair of bullet wounds inflicted by members of a rival street gang. A few months ago a glue buzz left another in this bunch, Gerson David Melendez, too disoriented to move out of the way of a car. The accident left him with a limp so severe he now says he moves from his spot under a palm tree in a shabby downtown park only when he needs to buy glue. On Tegucigalpa's outskirts, glue addiction is rampant. Dozens of street kids fight off dogs, rats and vultures to stake their claim to anything edible in two wretched-smelling trash bins filled with rotting vegetables and other filth from nearby warehouses. ``I DON'T REMEMBER things anymore,'' stammers Marvin Almendarez, 13, who is so high on glue he can't stand up straight for more than a few seconds at a time. Marvin, who lives in a nearby tenement next to a 10-foot pile of cow carcasses, spends his day hauling away the trash he does not eat so local vendors can avoid dumping fines. ``I get 20 lempiras ($1.33) per cartload,'' he says, unfocused eyes drifting slowly from place to place. ``I pay for glue that way.'' A 1996 law made it illegal for anyone other than licensed industrial distributors to sell the glue, but demand for the inhalant has spawned a cottage industry of illegal vendors. In small shops and dirt-floored hovels, the dealers pay 500 lempiras ($35) for a gallon of glue. After diluting it with paint thinner and bleach, the glue is sloshed into baby food jars that fetch about 10 lempiras (67 cents) each. ``Everybody here sells it. That's why you see every kid with his own jar,'' says Bolivar Zepeda, Honduras coordinator of children's activities for Casa Alianza, a Latin American child advocacy group affiliated with the New York-based Covenant House. ``Even store owners that are otherwise honest know they can make 4,000 lempiras ($265) a week selling this stuff, and that is a lot of money for them.'' Authorities say shutting down fly-by-night glue dens is next to impossible, and the government's attempts to loosen the glue's stranglehold on Honduran streets have had little impact. A law passed more than five years ago requires glue manufacturers to include a mustard compound that induces immediate vomiting and makes the glue impossible to inhale. The measure has not been enforced. ``The authorities who should enforce it do not believe in the laws because of the pressure from those profiting from producing glue,'' contends Alejandro Aplicano, a legal adviser for the government's Honduran Institute for Childhood and Family. ``The law is getting lost in the bureaucratic system, but it is getting lost intentionally because money is more influential than moral and legal commitment.'' ONE OF THE VICTIMS of the battle against glue addiction has been the St. Paul, Minn.-based H.B. Fuller Co., a Fortune 500 company and maker of industrial-grade adhesives sold all over the world. A company spokesman, Keralyn Groff, said that in November, with little fanfare, the company stopped selling ``solvent-based adhesives over-the-counter in Latin America.'' Though Fuller maintains it once controlled only about 1 percent of the Latin America glue market, Casa Alianza puts that figure at 70 percent. Resistol, a Fuller brand, has become the term that street kids use to describe all glue. Fuller says all of its remaining supplies of glue in Honduras should be used up and the fact that glue-sniffing continues to be a problem is proof that children were not abusing just its glue. Child advocacy leaders agree that glue addiction has continued unabated since Fuller quit the market. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek