MEXICO'S PRESIDENT UNVEILS ANTI-DRUG PLAN

Calderon Calls For Tests And New Parks As Part Of His Initiative

MONTERREY, Mexico -- Mexican President Felipe Calderon on Monday
launched a new phase of his anti-narcotics crusade that will include
the drug testing of students in more than 8,000 schools nationwide.

Calderon's initiative is seen as recognition of a growing problem
among Mexican adolescents. Many Mexicans, including police and other
officials, have long seen drug trafficking as an American problem,
limiting the public's support for combating the problem.

"Society is demanding a coordinated response from the authorities to
confront this social cancer," Calderon said at a junior high school
in Monterrey, the industrial hub 150 miles south of Laredo, Texas,
that has been battered by gangland violence this year.

"As a father I understand the worry of Mexicans who fear that their
children are victims of crime on the way to school, in the parks, in
the streets," said Calderon, who has three young children. "I know
the anguish and pain of mothers who realize, sometimes too late,
that their children have fallen into the claws of drugs."

In addition to calling for drug testing, Calderon said local, state
and federal governments will build more parks and sports complexes
and push for public involvement in them, with an initial $7 million
investment in Monterrey. And he said more than 300 clinics would be
opened across Mexico to treat drug and alcohol addictions.

The abuse of cocaine, crystal methamphetamine, heroin and other
narcotics in Mexico has skyrocketed during the past decade, by some
estimates increasing as much as 2,000 percent.

Authorities have become particularly concerned about crystal meth,
which is cheap enough to be widely used even among Mexico's poor majority.

Drug use going upThe number of Mexico City middle- and high-school
students who admitted using crystal meth doubled between 1997 and
2003, to 3.6 percent, according to the most recent study by the
National Psychiatric Institute. Fifteen percent admitted to using
some kind of narcotic, with cocaine, marijuana and meth the drugs of
choice.

However, experts say actual drug use among Mexican adolescents is
probably twice that high, particularly in poor urban
neighborhoods.

"Everything they can do to keep kids away from drugs is important,"
said Rodolfo Ramirez, president of the Mexico City-based policy group
Education and Change. But, he said, "the problem has deep social
roots that can't be attacked just through the schools."

He argued that Calderon's proposal would fail unless it also helped
adolescents find part-time jobs, reducing the incentive to turn to
drug-dealing.

Calderon said the student drug testing and other school enforcement
programs were a pilot program whose expansion would depend on an
evaluation of its effectiveness and feedback from parents. He did not
detail how the initial 8,000 schools would be selected, but his
speech focused on drug use in poorer neighborhoods.

'A consumer country'Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora told Mexico
City's El Universal newspaper that drug abuse in Mexico "is a
phenomenon that has gone unattended in recent decades and now we have
to face reality: that we're a consumer country."

Medina Mora argued the need for more funding for prevention in Mexico
and the United States. Currently, the Mexican government spends 16
times as much on combating the drug traffickers as it does on
fighting addictions, he said.

Warfare between the criminal gangs that smuggle cocaine and other
drugs into the United States has killed more than 1,300 people this
year and rattled the Mexican public. Police increasingly blame
rivalries among retail drug traffickers -- who sell in neighborhoods
and villages -- for a growing percentage of the bloodshed.

Calderon has sent more than 24,000 army troops into drug producing
and trafficking regions where the violence has been worse in recent
years. Last week, his administration removed nearly 300 commanders
from the federal police forces, replacing them with officers
supposedly more trustworthy.

The violence has slackened in recent weeks, spurring speculation that
the major trafficking organizations have reached a truce that will
help take public attention off them.