DRUG USE AT BORDER CONCERNS AUTHORITIES

Mexican town tries to deal with increases in walkthrough drug shacks and crime.

SAN LUIS RIO COLORADO, Mexico - Always the innovators, drug dealers in this
dusty border town have come up with a novel way to dispense
narcotics:They've opened walk-through windows.

Indeed, it isn't difficult to find addicts on the streets of San Luis, with
some 100 shooting galleries, rundown shacks and abandoned houses where
users inject drugs.

The customer walks up to an abandoned house, forks over $10 or $12, sticks
his arm through an opening and some anonymous soul on the other side
injects him with his drug of choice.

"It's a quick way to get a fix," said a 55-year-old rail-thin recovering
addict. "These little houses are open 24 hours a day. You can get drugs any
time."

Walk-through windows and other innovations are aimed at feeding a growing
number of addicts all along Mexico's northern border. U.S. and Mexican
officials are alarmed by the trend and vow to crack down on rising
consumption as part of a new bilateral strategy.

Residents of Mexico's northern states are particularly worried about
skyrocketing drug use, according to a national survey by The Dallas Morning
News and the MORI de Mexico polling firm.

Eighty-three percent of those surveyed in the north said drug addiction had
risen. Nationally, the poll showed.

Mexican families in the north say they're also troubled by the violence
that often accompanies drug use. Seventy-five percent said they felt
threatened by rising crime rates, compared with 60 percent nationally and
as low as 43 percent in central states.

San Luis Rio Colorado, a city of 200,000 across the border from Yuma,
Ariz., in the northwestern corner of Sonora state, is one of Mexico's hot
spots for drug consumption.

A visit to some of the city's bustling drug rehabilitation centers helps
illustrate the severity of the drug problem.

Crowded and underfunded, the centers are like pockets of resistance under
attack during a war, said Luis Navarro, who directs three rehabilitation
centers.

"Addicts arrive at all hours, some crying, others yelling hysterically. And
more and more of them are teen-agers," Navarro said.

"I had one kid come in who was 14 and said he had been using heroin since
the age of 9," he said. "It's not like it was in the '70s. Back then, if
you wanted heroin, the hard stuff, you had to cross the border into Arizona
to get it. No more. Now you can get drugs on practically every street
corner."

Federal authorities say drug use has climbed not only along the border but
also in Mexico City, where an estimated 40 of every 1,000 youths used
cocaine in 1997, compared with 15 of every 1,000 in 1993.

Overall drug use in Mexico remains low.

Fewer than five in 1,000 citizens are thought to consume narcotics, as
compared with 60 in 1,000 Americans, according to U.N. estimates.

Town officials in San Luis estimate that local addicts, thought to number
at least 6,000 are responsible for 80 percent of all reported crimes.

Methamphetamine, nicknamed cristal in Mexico, is the latest rage.

"I think cristal is the most dangerous drug there is," said Navarro. "It
does more damage to your body and it does it faster. You don't need to do
drugs for 15 or 20 years to destroy your brain and end up in a nuthouse.
With cristal, you can do it in a matter of months."

Navarro runs two rehabilitation centers in San Luis and one in nearby
Mexicali, tending to about 400 patients in all.

The fee for three months' treatment is 400 pesos, or about $48. The tiny
centers are crowded and have few comforts of home.

Many of those at the center said they paid for drugs by stealing.

"I robbed my mother, my father, my brothers. I cheated people on the
streets. I was always stealing, stealing and stealing," said Alfredo
Fernandez, 35, now assistant director of the centers in San Luis.

One day, he said, his mother told him she was going to give him a present.
He thought she was going to part with some family land, which he planned to
sell to buy more drugs.

"Instead she gave me papers showing she had bought two coffins - one for me
and one for her," he said. "It was her way of telling me that if I didn't
stop using drugs, I would kill myself and that it would kill her, too. I
started to wake up after that."