GLUE ADDICTION RAVAGES HONDURAN KIDS

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - Glue Addiction Is Rampant Among The City's
Youths, Robbing Them Of Their Health And Senses

When Cesar Ulices Padilla beds down on the streets of Honduras'
capital, he lulls himself to sleep sniffing from a baby food jar
tucked under his nose.

The jar contains industrial-strength shoe glue, and like nearly all
the 1,500 street kids in this hilly city, he is addicted to it.

``There would be no way to make it through a night without it,'' the
18- year-old says. ``That's why we live now. We live for the glue.''

The adhesive's fumes shock the nervous system and render the senses
useless for up to eight hours - making hunger, cold, loneliness and
pain fade.

But the chemicals also cause irreversible brain, lung and kidney
damage, leaving slack-jawed, glassy-eyed addicts stumbling through
their lives, unable to comprehend even the simplest aspects of the
world around them.

Street children sniff glue across Latin America. But nowhere are
things as bad as in Honduras, especially in the two years since
Hurricane Mitch killed 11,000 people and left at least 1.5 million
homeless.

``I WOULD USE COCAINE sometimes, but it seems too weak after you use
glue,'' says 17-year-old Carlos Javier Martinez, a panhandler who
sniffed glue for six years. He says he gave it up when two of his
friends starved to death after scorning the idea of buying food for
weeks, preferring instead to pool their money for jars of glue four
times a day.

``We've got crack and weed here, but they just aren't strong enough
for most of us like the glue is,'' Carlos says.

Many street kids have become all but oblivious to the world around
them, building an independent rhythm fueled by glue.

Ten-year-old Carlos Enrique, who begs for money by opening cab doors
for passengers, dances in his threadbare black-and-silver Pumas
sneakers to imagined music every time he pulls his head out of a
plastic bag filled with yellow globs of glue.

``It makes me feel like I am a superman, like I am better than
anyone,'' he says, spewing a cloud of glue-stinking breath from lips
stained yellow by glue residue.

Beside him, Jose Luis Zuazo, 15, puts his baby food jar aside long
enough to show off the gruesome scars on his chest from a pair of
bullet wounds inflicted by members of a rival street gang.

A few months ago a glue buzz left another in this bunch, Gerson David
Melendez, too disoriented to move out of the way of a car. The
accident left him with a limp so severe he now says he moves from his
spot under a palm tree in a shabby downtown park only when he needs to
buy glue.

On Tegucigalpa's outskirts, glue addiction is rampant. Dozens of
street kids fight off dogs, rats and vultures to stake their claim to
anything edible in two wretched-smelling trash bins filled with
rotting vegetables and other filth from nearby warehouses.

``I DON'T REMEMBER things anymore,'' stammers Marvin Almendarez, 13,
who is so high on glue he can't stand up straight for more than a few
seconds at a time.

Marvin, who lives in a nearby tenement next to a 10-foot pile of cow
carcasses, spends his day hauling away the trash he does not eat so
local vendors can avoid dumping fines.

``I get 20 lempiras ($1.33) per cartload,'' he says, unfocused eyes
drifting slowly from place to place. ``I pay for glue that way.''

A 1996 law made it illegal for anyone other than licensed industrial
distributors to sell the glue, but demand for the inhalant has spawned
a cottage industry of illegal vendors.

In small shops and dirt-floored hovels, the dealers pay 500 lempiras
($35) for a gallon of glue. After diluting it with paint thinner and
bleach, the glue is sloshed into baby food jars that fetch about 10
lempiras (67 cents) each.

``Everybody here sells it. That's why you see every kid with his own
jar,'' says Bolivar Zepeda, Honduras coordinator of children's
activities for Casa Alianza, a Latin American child advocacy group
affiliated with the New York-based Covenant House.

``Even store owners that are otherwise honest know they can make 4,000
lempiras ($265) a week selling this stuff, and that is a lot of money
for them.''

Authorities say shutting down fly-by-night glue dens is next to
impossible, and the government's attempts to loosen the glue's
stranglehold on Honduran streets have had little impact.

A law passed more than five years ago requires glue manufacturers to
include a mustard compound that induces immediate vomiting and makes
the glue impossible to inhale. The measure has not been enforced.

``The authorities who should enforce it do not believe in the laws
because of the pressure from those profiting from producing glue,''
contends Alejandro Aplicano, a legal adviser for the government's
Honduran Institute for Childhood and Family.

``The law is getting lost in the bureaucratic system, but it is
getting lost intentionally because money is more influential than
moral and legal commitment.''

ONE OF THE VICTIMS of the battle against glue addiction has been the
St. Paul, Minn.-based H.B. Fuller Co., a Fortune 500 company and maker
of industrial-grade adhesives sold all over the world.

A company spokesman, Keralyn Groff, said that in November, with little
fanfare, the company stopped selling ``solvent-based adhesives
over-the-counter in Latin America.''

Though Fuller maintains it once controlled only about 1 percent of the
Latin America glue market, Casa Alianza puts that figure at 70
percent. Resistol, a Fuller brand, has become the term that street
kids use to describe all glue.

Fuller says all of its remaining supplies of glue in Honduras should
be used up and the fact that glue-sniffing continues to be a problem
is proof that children were not abusing just its glue.

Child advocacy leaders agree that glue addiction has continued
unabated since Fuller quit the market.