Pubdate: Sun, 23 Jun 2002 Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA) Copyright: 2002 San Jose Mercury News Contact: http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/390 Author: Kevin G. Hall LOWER COST, U.S. PATROLS CAUSE RISE IN MEXICAN COCAINE USE Families Struggle With New Crisis MEXICO CITY - After years of dismissing cocaine as a U.S. problem, Mexicans are finding that it's their problem, too. Government drug-treatment clinics that saw 3,000 abusers a year in the 1990s now see 50,000. Abuse used to be largely confined to the northern Mexican states from which U.S. cocaine smuggling operations were launched. Now it has seeped south to big cities such as Mexico City and Guadalajara. There, powdered cocaine, with its high price limiting its use to Mexico's upper classes, has given way to $2-a-rock crack so cheap that it's luring street kids away from sniffing solvents. The problem has deep roots, but the security crackdown on the U.S.-Mexican border since Sept. 11 intensified it, Mexican drug officials say. They say smugglers are finding it harder to move cocaine into the United States and instead are selling it in Mexico -- at rock-bottom prices. As evidence, they cite the high purity of cocaine recently seized, suggesting that smugglers are selling the drug before squeezing out the extra profit derived from cutting it. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration chief Asa Hutchinson corroborates the theory that tighter border enforcement is responsible. Cocaine purity fell 9 percent last year in the United States, reflecting tight supply, Hutchinson told the Mercury News. U.S. coke dealers are "diluting it to make it go further," he said. In Mexico City's outskirts, at a group-therapy session for parents of drug addicts, Pedro Bernal Garca rues the consequences. The working-class father explains that he thought Mexico was only a transit country for Colombian cocaine bound for the United States. "We are just so sad because we don't want to accept that our kids have fallen into drugs," said Bernal, whose two sons, aged 27 and 24, are imprisoned for stealing to feed their cocaine habits. As other parents nod in unison, he adds something many U.S. families already know: "This is a global problem." Mexico now has at least 2.5 million drug users and at least half a million of them are hard-core drug addicts, said Guido Belsasso, Mexico's anti-addictions czar, in a recent interview at the National Addictions Advisory Board. Mexico's population is about 100 million. Historically, traffickers brought Colombian cocaine to the United States via the Florida and gulf coasts. More effective interdiction in those areas during the 1990s compelled Colombian traffickers to make Mexico the principal transit route for U.S.-bound cocaine. Along the way, Colombians began paying with cocaine instead of money. What Mexican cartels couldn't get across the border they began selling in Mexico. Police complicity in the drug trade is part of the problem. On Reforma, Mexico City's main boulevard, the driver of a police tractor-trailer rig carrying horses passes a Mercury News reporter. The driver, wearing a police uniform, holds a lit marijuana cigarette the size of a cigar. Mexican newspapers report almost daily about police on the payroll of drug traffickers. "I think if kids know where to find the drugs, then certainly the authorities must know this," said Villegas of Casa Alianza. "It is a bit like the authorities are closing their eyes." Near one downtown food market, a group of addicted children and teenagers smoke rocks of cocaine just doors away from the local police precinct headquarters. Cocaine "used to be just for adults, but now kids can get it easily," said Marta Rodrguez Lopez, 41, a street addict who acts as den mother to the group of ragged, drug-addicted street kids. "They sell it to them like it was chocolate." - --- MAP posted-by: Beth