MEXICO'S DRUG TRADE TAKING DOWN ITS CITIZENS

Abuse Problems Now Touching All Walks Of Life

TIJUANA, Mexico -- Until recently, Francisco Soto walked a treacherous path
between two of Mexico's underworlds.

The 16-year-old high-school dropout earned up to $1,000 a week sneaking
undocumented Mexicans across the border to the USA. Back home he snorted
cocaine, taking after his step father and godfather -- a former federal
officer -- both of whom earned plum money selling drugs.

All that changed recently when Soto's stepfather and godfather were shot
dead recently over a $40,000 drug debt to their suppliers. At his mother's
behest, Soto was interned at the 24-bed Centros de Integracion Juvenil
clinic in Tijuana. The clinic is part of a non-profit national chain that
treats youth addictions. "My father's death made me ask myself if I wanted
to end up the same way," Soto says.

Mexicans, whose country is a key juncture in the contraband pipeline that
stretches from Colombia to Canada, increasingly are succumbing to drug
abuse, victims of their own illicit trade.

It is only now becoming clear that the sale and use of illegal drugs touches
more than the dealers, whose ostentatious and violent lifestyle is
celebrated in Mexican popular culture.

Mexican pop songs, known as corridos, glorify the country's Cocaine Cowboys,
extolling the riches and ignoring the dark side of the drug trade. Under
such titles as The King of Drugs and A Trafficker's Empire, the corridos
have made the automatic weapons-packing tough guys who wear silver-studded
belts, boots and cowboy hats role models for Mexican youths seeking to
escape poverty.

But it's not just the poor and the dealers who have been ensnared by drug
abuse. Much of the country's legitimately earned wealth -- and disposable
income available for recreational drugs -- also is concentrated in northern
Mexico, where the economic symbiosis with the USA is strongest.

Nowhere is the narco-culture more evident than in Tijuana, a world- class
"Sin City" since the days of Prohibition when Hollywood society came here
for its fix of liquor, prostitutes and bullfights.

Today, Tijuana is a stronghold of Latin American drug lords who move
mountains of cocaine, heroin and marijuana into the USA. It's also the
center of drug consumption in Mexico.

About 15% of Tijuana's population acknowledges trying drugs at least once,
triple the national rate, according to a Mexican government study done in
1999.

The Centros de Integracion Juvenil, where Soto ended up, is one of more than
50 drug-treatment establishments in this border city. It provides 10-week
treatment programs for up to $50 a week.

Nationwide, Mexico identifies about 400,000 drug addicts, or 0.4% of the 100
million-strong population. It is a relatively small number. By comparison,
25.1% of the population is tobacco-dependent; 9.4% alcohol-dependent, says
Jesus Cabrera, chief executive of the Centros de Integracion Juvenil
organization in Mexico City.

But Mexicans have reason to be concerned. Drug use increased by more than
half from 1988 to 1998. Specifically, 5.3% of the Mexican population
acknowledges experimenting with drugs at least once, up from 3.3% in 1988,
according to government polling. In Tijuana, government pollsters recently
registered a five-fold increase in drug use compared with a decade earlier.
And women increasingly are victims, representing 1 in every 13 drug addicts
today compared with 1 in 23 drug addicts in 1993, government figures show.

By comparison, the USA counts 3.6 million drug addicts (1.3% of the
population), according to the White House Office of National Drug Control
Policy. And about 10% of America's 275.5 million people are alcoholics, the
American Council on Alcoholism says. "Twenty years ago, here at the border,
it was unusual for one to say they knew someone with a drug problem," says
Jose Jauregui, 40, a Tijuana-born psychiatrist who treated alcoholism in
Russia for a decade before returning home to combat his country's
drug-addiction problems.

"In the last few years there isn't a family without a drug problem. There
isn't a neighborhood without a drug problem. There isn't a group of friends
where one isn't affected by drugs," Jauregui says. "It's an important
change."

He diagnoses Mexico's drug problem as an unintended consequence of the
country's growing integration with the U.S. economy and culture: "Nearness
itself is a danger. There is a nexus in this invisible border where people
come and go. They develop a commonality of drug use and drug abuse."

University of Oklahoma researcher Alberto Mata, a member of the Border
Epidemiology Work Group, which studies border-related health problems, says
the trend has implications for both countries. "To what degree is hepatitis
being passed along? To what degree do we have new sexually transmitted
diseases coming along? Populations you didn't think would intersect meet
when they're partying," Mata says.

Maria Adelita Madriles, 23, is one woman on the wrong side of the trend
line.

Madriles says she became addicted to methamphetamines, the border area's
drug of choice, due to loneliness and the drug's easy availability in the
Tijuana barrio where she lives. While her husband was away, supervising the
construction of mobile homes in the USA, Madriles says, she experimented.

"I knew I was going bad, but I liked it. I like the feeling," Madriles says.
Two months ago she realized she had become estranged from her two children.
After informing her husband of her problem, she checked herself into the
Centros de Integracion Juvenil.

Meanwhile, Francisco Soto paced the center's cement compound for 10 weeks
like a caged animal, completing the intense but brief in-patient program
that consisted of social and psychological counseling and drug education.

He is young. He is strong. The handsome youth harbors no doubt he will
triumph over drugs, returning to school and work.

But Soto's mother, Patricia Carapia, 35, can't help but wonder.

"I see a change in him. But he always carries his friends in his mind. This
is what makes me afraid," Carapia says. The now-widowed mother wonders also
whether her ability to provide for her son with a border- factory job that
pays $59 a week will satisfy a youth who has tasted some temptations that
the world has to offer.

"We had money," Carapia acknowledges," but it wasn't the life I wanted."

"Narcotrafficking is a form of upward mobility. For some people it's the
only way out," says Jorge Chabat, co-author of the forthcoming book, Public
Insecurity in Mexico and the U.S.: Threats to Democratic Governance. "Also,
it represents defiance of authority, which is attractive to a part of the
population whose contact with the establishment hasn't been friendly."

Over time, however, Mexican drug dealers are prone to become drug abusers,
medical studies show. Some narcotrafficking employees are paid not with
money but with drugs they can sell or consume, Chabat says. Francisco's step
father and godfather followed the perilous path from being dealers to
addicts .

Completing the vicious cycle, virtually all drug users become drug sellers
to support their habit, Jauregui says. The doctor says Francisco Soto's
mother has reason to fear a relapse in his addiction in response to economic
needs or psychological pressures -- or both.

"If we talk about long-term success, people who report 20-30% recovery rates
are very successful. People who report 50-80% recovery rates are lying,"
Jauregui says.

U.S. officials often brow beat the Mexican government into improving
drug-interdiction efforts. And although their primary concern is reducing
American s' drug dependence, which statistics indicate is abating, they say
they'd also like to spare the Mexicans the downside of that experience.

At the end of high-level drug talks in Mexico City on Aug. 9, Barry
McCaffrey, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control
Policy, said, "We told the Mexicans if you jump on this you won't have
happen to you what happened to us."

But Mexico, like the USA and most nations, pours far more financial
resources into the war on drugs than the battle to save drug addicts. The
lonely fight waged by drug-afflicted Mario Alberto Morales, 21, illustrates
how difficult victory is to achieve. One of four sons in a low-income
Mexican family -- two of his brothers are drug addicts -- Morales says he
was first offered cocaine at a border bar when he was 15. As his taste for
drugs became an addiction, the intense youth fenced stolen goods, fought
police and saw one brother and his father mistakenly arrested and beaten in
a municipal jail for his deeds.

Staring down the barrel of a police officer's gun was not the most
terrifying experience in his life, Morales says. He says it was the
realization that came to him after he crashed his car, stole another and
crashed that car, too, having beaten and robbed the owner with the help of
friends. Morales remembers thinking: "I don't have the blood for this."

One of Morales' younger brothers, Alejandro, 16, told him, "You're going in
for treatment tomorrow."

"I didn't argue," Morales says. "I knew I was in bad shape."

Now, as his 21/2-month stay at the Centros de Integracion Juvenil comes to
an end, Morales' dark eyes reflect the uncertainty and fear that accompany
his imminent release.

"After six years of being an addict with my friends it's hard to leave them
after just 10 weeks of treatment," he says. "Hard, but not impossible."