Pubdate: Sat, 29 Jun 2002 Source: Miami Herald (FL) Copyright: 2002 The Miami Herald Contact: http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/262 Author: Kevin G. Hall, Herald World Staff Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine) COCAINE THEIR PROBLEM, TOO, MEXICANS DISCOVER 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 a year. Abuse used to be largely confined to the northern Mexican states from which U.S. cocaine smuggling operations were launched. Now it has spread south to larger cities such as Mexico City and Guadalajara. There, powder cocaine, with its high price limiting its use to Mexico's upper classes, has given way to $2-a-rock crack that is luring street kids away from sniffing solvents. While the problem has deep roots, Mexican drug officials say the security crackdown on the U.S.-Mexican border since Sept. 11 has intensified it. 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. 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. ENFORCEMENT 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 said in an interview. U.S. coke dealers are "diluting it to make it go further," he said. At a group therapy session for parents of drug addicts outside Mexico City, Pedro Bernal Garcia rues the consequences. The working class father says 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, 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 addicts, said Guido Belsasso, who heads Mexico's anti-addiction effort, at a meeting of the National Addictions Advisory Board. Mexico's population is about 100 million. According to Health Ministry studies, more than 5 percent of Mexicans aged 12 to 65 have tried illicit drugs, far below the 39 percent rate for Americans reported by U.S. drug abuse agencies. But it's a troubling number for a conservative country more accustomed to alcoholism than drug abuse. NEW ROUTE Historically, traffickers brought Colombian cocaine to the United States through Florida and other Gulf states. More effective interdiction in those areas during the 1990s compelled Colombian traffickers to seek other routes. They often partnered with Mexican marijuana traffickers and made 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. "In the past two years, they've been smoking rocks [of cocaine]. It is incredibly cheap and very easy to get," said Mari Rouss Villegas, assistant to the director of Casa Alianza, a group in Mexico City that works with drug-addicted street children. It is affiliated with Covenant House, a New York charity. KIDS GET HOOKED "If you have a one-kilogram [2.2-pound] block of cocaine, you can't go to the bank and cash it out. That's how kids 7, 8 and 9 are getting hooked," Belsasso said. "That is the new scene in Mexico City." 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 reporter. The driver, wearing a police uniform, holds a 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." - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom