HOOKED ON THE BORDER

Patients at a south Reynosa drug rehab center sometimes walk up onto
the roof to look out over the city before their evening meeting.

On clear evenings, they can see the bright lights of the city center,
the maquilas where many of them used to work and the Rio Grande
winding its way to the east.

Jose Alfredo Martinez, a thin, 36-year-old father of two struggling
with a crack addiction, is one of those patients.

He can almost see his home neighborhood on the southern banks of the
river. There, only 100 yards from the United States, narcotics
designated for shipment to New York and Houston are selling like
never before, causing an epidemic of drug addiction.

He pointed at a 16-year-old who is also addicted to crack.

"He lives just down the street from me. I know his parents," Martinez
said in Spanish.

"A lot of traffickers live in the neighborhood and they bring their
shipments there before it crosses the river. Most of it goes across,
but when it sits there they sell off parts of it to us. They didn't
before, but for the last five years you can get crack and cocaine,
and now everybody's addicted."

Over the past five years, Reynosa and other Mexican cities on the
U.S. border have experienced rapidly increasing rates of drug
addiction, particularly crack addiction, in their poorer
neighborhoods, said Alejandra Trevino, director of Centro de
Attencion a la Juventid, a division of Mexico's ministry of health.

Considering the region's position as the primary point of entry for
drug shipments into the United States, it's hardly surprising that
drugs are readily available. What's changed recently is traffickers'
willingness to sell in Mexico as opposed to the American cities where
their product could command a much higher price.

The explanation in Mexico, supported by Trevino and other government
officials, attributes the shift to increased border security by U.S.
law enforcement since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Drugs
aren't getting through as easily, causing a virtual bottleneck of
cocaine, marijuana and even heroin on the Mexican side of the border.

"Mexico is the place drug flows through and when they don't pass
through they stay on the border," Trevino said in Spanish.

"You talk to the people in the neighborhoods and you hear this all the time."

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, while unwilling to comment
on drug distribution inside Mexico, did say tighter security had hurt
the drug cartels' ability to traffic across the border.

"It has, but the traffickers are very resourceful, so they adjust
their trafficking and smuggling techniques to the resistance they get
from U.S. law enforcement," said Will Glaspy, head of the DEA's McAllen office.

"Along any trafficking route in the world, eventually you will see
addiction problems develop. The more drugs are around; the more
people will experiment with them."

ADDICTION

Within the walls of the Reynosa branch of CRREAD, a Christian
non-profit that provides free drug treatment across Mexico, residents
are required to publicly renounce their addiction and catalog the
multitude of misdeeds they committed while using three times a day.

The stories, uttered under a tin roof to the encouraging cheers from
other residents, all bear a remarkable similarity to one another. A
broken home, lots of time on the streets as a teenager, an offer of
free drugs from a friend followed by increasing dependency until they
ended up here, a dilapidated two-story building filled with more than
50 addicts in various stages of withdrawal set in a middle class
south Reynosa neighborhood.

In late October, Jose Pablo Colegio, a 16-year-old high school
dropout, arrived at the center.

What had started as a light crack habit three years earlier had
progressed to the point Colegio was smoking crack seven days a week.
The skinny teenager with the ball cap turned backward paid for the
drugs, which only cost him $10 a day, with a construction job his
father helped him get.

He'd buy from a dealer living in an apartment near his family's home
and smoke at the construction site, after work with friends, whenever
the moment struck him. By October, his family had enough and dragged
him off to CRREAD, a decision he did not protest.

"When I'm smoking it's great, but even then I'm thinking it's bad for
me," Colegio said.

"When I first got here I didn't know what was going on, but they
talked to me, showed me what I was doing wrong and what I needed to do."

Unlike most rehab facilities, CRREAD asks its patients to quit
without the assistance of prescribed drugs to lessen the affects of
withdrawal. Patients arrive and their bodies almost immediately begin
craving whatever drug they were using, often leading to vomiting,
diarrhea, insomnia and a heightened state of anxiety.

For their first three months patients are required to sleep behind
locked gates to keep them from escaping. All they're given is a
regimented schedule of group therapy sessions, chores and optional
religious instruction -- though almost all of the residents have
converted to Christianity since arriving at CRREAD.

"It's cold turkey, and it's difficult for them. Most of them won't
sleep for a while," said Pablo Gaono, the 37-year-old co-founder of
the center and a former heroin addict.

"We just have to keep telling them, they can stop doing the drugs.
They need to see what's possible."

After three months patients have the option to leave the center, but
many of them will stay on for months. Like all rehab programs, CRREAD
will see a lot of them again in years to come.

Esteban Mata Rosales, a 30-year-old waiter who lives in the small
town of Camargo, returned to the center for the second time a few
weeks ago after a crack binge.

"The program, it's great when you're here because you have everyone
around you, helping you," he said.

"You go home and there's no one there. First you break down and have
a beer. Then it's a margarita, and you're like ' why not cocaine?'
It's everywhere, even in my little town."

THE CRACK CRISIS

Commander Noe Hinojosa Villarreal keeps a photo album on his office
computer at Tamaulipas state police headquarters. All of the photos
are from criminal cases under investigation. One, a dead man lying on
his back on a Reynosa sidewalk with a bullet hole in his forehead,
catches his eye.

"We found crack in his pocket," Villarreal said. "We're seeing more
and more of this.

"This is what crack is doing to our city."

Drug-related crime, largely burglaries and car thefts, have increased
steadily over the past few years, Villarreal said. Up until 10 years
ago Villarreal rarely saw people with drugs other than marijuana, and
he attributes this latest trend in petty crime to the growing
popularity of crack and other synthetic drugs.

"Before we didn't consume much of that here and now it's everywhere,"
Villarreal said in Spanish.

"I think a lot of it has to do with social problems. The family
structure is on the decline, there's less work available because of
all the people moving here."

What Villarreal, Trevino and other Mexican officials working on the
drug addiction problem want to see is more money and time going
toward prevention, namely drug education campaigns. During the U.S.
crack epidemic in the 1980s, the U.S. government invested heavily in
programs like DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), which have been
credited in some circles with helping reduce the rate of drug abuse
amongst adolescents.

"Prevention is the key," Trevino said. "We need all the society to
understand that this is a health crisis."

"It's not going to be resolved in a year, it's going to take a long
time. But the government is very interested in starting a permanent
campaign, not just one day here and there."

When, if ever, Mexico would actually commit to such a program is questionable.

Traditionally, the Mexican government has offered little real support
to drug education programs, said Rodrigo Guzman, a former coordinator
with the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, a federal agency that
operates in Mexico and the United States.

"It's a very different system over there. Basically, not enough money
is going to prevention," Guzman said.

"The belief of prevention is we need to work on this issue from the
earliest age, even from Pre-K, so they know the dangers. They are
starting to show some interest over there, but I don't see a change
anytime soon."