AVAILABILITY ALLOWS LOCAL TEENS TO TRY MORE DANGEROUS DRUGS

Drug use in El Paso is estimated to be lower than the national average, but
El Paso's teen-agers are trying more dangerous drugs, including heroin,
officials said.

"It's cheap here and available. In other places it's too expensive to
experiment with," said Richard Perkins, deputy director of Aliviane, a
treatment center that admitted 495 juveniles and 2,021 adults in 1999, the
latest figures available.

Most United States drug users are in high school, said David Monnette, the
demand reduction coordinator for the Drug Enforcement Administration in El
Paso -- and they usually chose marijuana for their first foray into drug use.

Quoting national figures, he said that 40 percent of high-school students
will try marijuana at least once, and half of them will never use it again.

"In El Paso, we're doing slightly better than that," he said.

But not when it comes to funding, says the treatment community.

"The trend here is we're underfunded," said Charlie Garcia, chairman of the
regional advisory consortium for the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug
Abuse.

In El Paso, 10 percent of the money used to fight the war on drugs is used
for treatment and prevention, according to budget figures provided to the
El Paso Times by drug-fighting agencies.

Last year, El Paso lost its largest drug- and alcohol-detox program for the
poor, Casa Blanca, to legal and financial problems. And in February,
Canutillo's Rio Grande Residential Treatment Center, the only residential
treatment center for teen-agers in the region, closed.

Teen-age addicts are sent to Houston, while adults detoxify at Aliviane, or
by themselves in El Paso's jails and hospitals.

Monnette, who came up with an anti-drug program directed at high-school
students called Teens In Prevention, and treatment professionals believe in
prevention, they said.

Crimes, Monnette said, are committed by drug users, not drug traffickers.

"But you're not going to arrest your way out of the problem," he said.
"It's a community problem; it requires community solutions."