DRUG TRADE TAKES ROOT, AND TOLL, IN MEXICO

ZAMORA, Mexico - When she gets her high, Lupita Diaz says she enters
a sweet illusion of peace, a respite from her pain and self-loathing.
She lies on her back in a meadow on the edge of town here with other
addicts, looks up at the stars and plays aimlessly on a battered blue
harmonica.

Sunrise brings a crashing sensation. Her joints ache. Her mouth goes
dry. She has cold sweats, jumps at shadows, hears voices in her head.
She is willing, once again, to prostitute herself to get $5 for
another hit of crack cocaine or crystal methamphetamine. She has been
an addict for years, and her slight body is nearly worn out. She gave
away her two children to others to raise.

"There is nothing nice about being here," she said, slurring her
words and covering her watery eyes with pink sunglasses. "It feels
ugly not to be with your children. Feels awful. It's not what I want.
It's not what I like. But when I have money, I want the drugs."

Ms. Diaz's story of addiction is common enough in most of America's
big cities, but until a few years ago it was rare in central Mexico.
That has changed. Today, Mexico is no longer just a transit country
for drugs bound for the United States. It is a country of drug users as well.

As Mexican drug cartels have grown in power, they have begun to open
up local markets for cheap forms of highly addictive drugs like crack
and ice, as methamphetamine is known. Now even medium-sized towns
like Zamora have large and growing populations of addicts, along with
a rise in violent crime.

"Ten or 15 years ago we didn't even see powdered cocaine, just
marijuana," said Cmdr. Juan Carlos Espinosa of the Zamora police
department. "Then about three years ago we started to see a lot of
signs of ice, crack and heroin."

The trend has alarmed Mexican officials. In July, President Felipe
Calderon set in motion a program to test all high school students for
drugs. The attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, has repeatedly
raised a red flag in recent months.

"It's a phenomenon - one must say clearly - not attended to in recent
decades in this country, and now we have to turn to deal with what is
a reality: that we are also a country of consumers," Mr. Medina Mora
told the newspaper El Universal.

One measure of the trend is the number of people who have checked
into federal drug rehabilitation centers. The number of crack addicts
seeking treatment nationwide has tripled since 2001; the number
seeking help for methamphetamine addiction has doubled.

The health secretary, Jose Angel Cordova Villalobos, acknowledged in
July that the government lacked the clinics, hospital beds and
resources to deal with the wave of addiction.

About 20,000 beds are available, he said, and only 120 of those are
in public clinics.

In Zamora, a town of 170,000 people in Michoacan State, about 80
miles southeast of Guadalajara in western Mexico, the evidence of
addiction is everywhere. Ragged people sleep in vacant lots and on
the street. Street crime is common. Some streets have become drug
bazaars, with crack houses interspersed among corner grocery stores
and video arcades.

Private drug rehabilitation centers have sprouted up in nearly every
poor neighborhood, a cottage industry of sorts. Most of them are
tiny, squalid houses where addicts are locked up for three months and
given a short course on the 12-step program developed by Alcoholics Anonymous.

In interviews, addicts in various stages of recovery described how
their dependence on methamphetamine or crack cocaine turned them into
dealers, prostitutes and thieves. Most of them described a similar
fall from grace. Experimenting with the drugs led to insatiable
addiction that drove them to sell everything and, eventually, to commit crimes.

Typical of the two dozen private rehabilitation centers in Zamora is
La Esperanza, a shelter on Matamoros Street. It is a single-family
home that houses more than 30 addicts, who sleep on bunks and share a
single malodorous bathroom.

The doors are locked all day, and sheet metal is welded over the
windows. Families paid $100 to place their relatives here.

Among the residents was Aurora Victoria Gomez, a 28-year-old woman
who ran away, became hooked on methamphetamine and became a
prostitute at age 13. She has three children she never sees. "For me
it was a lost life, sad, walking the streets, rejected, humiliated,"
she said. "Truth is, I never had a happy moment."

Some older addicts said they hardly recognized their town these days.

Joaquin Antonio Gutierrez, 39, said he became addicted to
methamphetamine in 1988 when he was working illegally as a gardener
in San Diego. Soon he took to selling the drug to finance his habit.
He spent two stints in California prisons before he was deported.
Once back in Zamora, he said, he was surprised to find that
methamphetamine and crack had taken root in his hometown.

"When I was a kid, you almost never saw any drugs," he said. "But now
in whatever street you go down, you see people selling."

Two years ago, Mr. Gutierrez finally kicked his habit at a federal
outpatient clinic here, known as the Center for Juvenile Integration,
with the help of anti-depressants and psychotherapy. It is the only
federal clinic for addicts in the state.

Jose Francisco Gil Cerda, a psychologist who runs the clinic, said
crack cocaine and methamphetamine addicts tended to be aggressive,
violent and paranoid. Most of them start out using the drug as a form
of speed, trying to stay awake to work longer. After a short time,
however, the drug robs them of sleep, eliminates their appetite and
eats away at their organs, including the brain.

Domingo Castro, 33, a street vendor now in the clinic, said he tried
to beat his father to death and raped a close friend of his mother's.
Methamphetamine nearly killed him, he said.

"The ice, man, you are like a god," he said. "Everything is yours.
Everything belongs to you. But it destroys your system. You are
fooling yourself."

On the other side of town, a group of 33 cocaine and methamphetamine
addicts struggle with their demons in an unassuming green two-story
building belonging to Drug Addicts Anonymous. The addicts bake and
sell bread to support the center.

Typical of the younger addicts is a 24-year-old who did not want to
be identified. He started using methamphetamine as a lark when he was
15 in the town of Apatzingan, the headquarters of the reputed
Valencia drug cartel.

Quickly addicted, he left home and lived on the street, stealing
money from his relatives. At 18, he tried joining the army to
straighten himself out, but found that drug use was rampant among the
troops as well.

So he deserted after two years and returned to the street, living in
an abandoned house and mugging people. Each dose of the drug cost
about $5, and sometimes he had to rob two or three people to get
enough. He was rail thin, filthy, with a matted beard.

"There comes a time when you need it and if you don't get it, you
start to sweat and despair," he said. "You hear things that don't
exist. You can see a shadow and think it's someone who wants to kill you."

Finally, on Jan. 1, 2004, his paranoia and fear of the police had
grown to the point that he was afraid to leave the ruined building he
lived in. He crept back to his father's house and asked for help. His
father took him to a private clinic in Morelia, 125 miles from
Apatzingan. Since then, it has been a daily struggle with the silent
call of the drug.

"There is a fear," he said, turning worried eyes toward the street
outside the clinic. "Out there in the world, it is easier that
temptation will win you over."