SPAIN'S COCAINE PROBLEM

Long a Transit Point for Smuggling into Europe, the Country Is Now
the Largest Consumer of the Drug on the Continent, Recent Studies Show.

MADRID -- Around dawn on a Sunday, packs of young people are huddled
at stoplights, or ambling down Paseo del Prado.

Despite the hour, the day isn't just beginning for them. Like
thousands of young Spaniards, they are ending a long night of
hard-core partying that very likely included the unbridled snorting of cocaine.

At crowded clubs and throbbing bars along Madrid's Gran Via, and on
side streets radiating from the Puerta del Sol, the city's heart, a
gram of coke is casually sold for 50 euros -- about $79 -- and
quickly consumed in restrooms or nearby parked cars.

"It's easier to get cocaine than to get a library card," said Gustavo
Rodriguez, a 31-year-old business student, recalling his nocturnal
carousing before he went into rehab.

Spain has become the top consumer of cocaine in continental Europe,
according to a recent European Union study on drug use. By a United
Nations count, 3% of Spain's adult population consumes cocaine;
that's a bigger percentage than the erstwhile leader, the United
States, at 2.3%.

Among younger age groups, the number of Spanish users has doubled,
even quadrupled, during the last decade, the statistics indicate.

Part of the reason for the dramatic increase is that Spain is the
primary transit point for cocaine smuggled into Europe from Latin
America. In cargo ships and on airplanes, hidden in machine parts,
frozen octopus or just about anything else, tons of cocaine arrive at
Spanish and Portuguese ports every month.

And you can't be a transit point forever without eventually sampling the goods.

It was a similar story a couple of decades ago for the world's top
producing countries, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia; for years they
boasted of being free of drug addiction in their own populations --
they merely grew and processed the stuff and shipped it onward. But
it didn't stay that way.

In Spain, the rise in consumption is also linked to a swift
transition in Spanish society. In barely one generation, this nation
of 40 million moved from a long, repressive military dictatorship to
a dynamic, youthful democracy with (until recently) a vibrant economy.

With Spaniards' newfound freedom came a cultural reawakening and
fast-paced change, an era called La Movida that also gave way to
permissiveness and a breakdown in traditions. And though some of the
hedonism of the '80s has evolved into something a little more
sophisticated, a fresh crop of young Spaniards won't let go of a
firmly held compulsion for frenzied celebration of the weekend.

"It's a spoiled generation. They've suffered little, matured little
and are not well-educated," said Modesto Salgado, who runs one of
Spain's main drug rehab programs. "They live for the moment, to enjoy."

Salgado says Spain's predominant drug problem in the '80s and early
'90s was heroin. Today, cocaine is by far the drug of choice: Nearly
two-thirds of the patients in the 26 centers managed by his program,
Proyecto Hombre, are cocaine abusers. Proyecto Hombre started the
coke program only five years ago; it hadn't seemed necessary before
that, Salgado said.

At his rehab center in Guadalajara, a bedroom community 35 miles
northeast of Madrid, patients are in yearlong residential programs or
larger outpatient regimens. Most are in their late 20s and are
middle- or upper-class professionals.

On a recent evening, the mostly male clients were standing in front
of the new brick building, having a smoke. Their mothers and other
relatives were inside attending a special meeting for families; some
emerged tearful.

Rodriguez, the business student, was there. A tall, strapping man
with good looks and an easy smile, Rodriguez said the danger of
cocaine is that it sneaks up on you. And, compared with heroin, it's
still socially acceptable and, in the minds of many, associated with
glamour and success. Plus, it's cheap -- a line costs about as much
as two cups of coffee.

"You think you can live normally, but you don't see what it does to
your health, over time," said Rodriguez, who added that he has kicked
a 10-year habit. "I couldn't finish anything I started. My parents
didn't know where I was or what I was doing. The tragedy is the core
of my family life was destroyed."

The overwhelming majority of cocaine users in Spain, and of those who
seek rehab, are men, Salgado and other officials said. Women still
face more of a stigma than do men when it comes to using drugs and
turning to treatment, said Antonio Cuadrado, a therapist at Proyecto Hombre.

Police and some government officials question the ranking of Spain as
Europe's top consumer. Authorities say they think they are getting a
handle on the problem, and the Health Ministry says consumption among
the young fell last year for the first time.

But no one disputes the prevalence of the drug and the fact that
cocaine being shipped through Spain is leaving a trail of dust and dope.

Traffickers, peddlers and other purveyors of the powder "are finding
a very good market here," said Jose Luis Conde Velazquez, chief of
the drugs and organized crime police unit.

Yet the government is still figuring out the best way to fight
cocaine. Carmen Moya Garcia, an epidemiologist who heads the Health
Ministry's National Plan on Drugs, said attention that has been
focused on the interdiction of traffickers is finally shifting to
include consumption.

A four-year action plan launched last year by the government attempts
to break the glorifying myths surrounding cocaine with TV and Web
campaigns. And nightclubs, bars and other establishments of leisure
are being asked to cooperate with authorities in prohibiting drug use
on their premises, by posting signs and keeping bathrooms clear.

Moya said authorities have been able to argue to the clubs, with some
success, that cooperation won't hurt business.

Last summer, in party mecca Ibiza, the government sent a message by
shutting down three clubs on the Mediterranean island with such names
as Amnesia for a month or more, at the height of the season, as
punishment for what police said was flaunting of drugs.

Demand for rehab treatment has soared the way consumption has, and
programs such as Proyecto Hombre are at capacity. The experts in
those places say the crisis is a deeper phenomenon of questioned
ideals and changing values, something that cannot be resolved merely
by cracking down on clubs and rounding up small-time pushers, known
here in slang as camellos.

"Society has gone from being very rigid to too permissive," said
Cuadrado, the therapist. Cocaine abuse "is going to grow," he said.
"We are only just beginning to treat this."