RIO ARRIBA FIGHTS TO CONQUER DRUG DEMONS

CHIMAYO - It has been described as a place caught between heaven and hell:
a sacred valley whose vistas inspire the mind and whose soil is said to
have healing power, and yet it is a place of so much pain.

Makeshift memorials brand the landscape with crosses, and dirty syringes
often rest nearby. Death haunts those who have lost loved ones to the
demon, and those who accept they might be next.

Those like Renee Martinez, with her vacant, bloodshot eyes and pendant of
the Virgin of Guadalupe that rests atop an oversized T-shirt shrouding her
track marks. The 21-year-old has been using heroin for three years now,
cocaine about half that time.

On a sunny morning, the addict and a friend scout the parking lot of a
methadone clinic in Rio Arriba County, hustling cash for their daily shot
of the drug that cuts the craving for heroin.

Renee says she is trying to quit, then acknowledges shooting up two days
earlier. "You meet up with your friends, they want you to score for them,
then you end up getting high with them."

For years, the county of 40,000 people in Northern New Mexico has had the
highest drug-overdose rate in the nation; 20 people died last year alone.

In Chimayo, an old Spanish settlement where only 3,000 people live, the
Drug Enforcement Administration reported 85 deaths between 1995 and 1998
attributed to high-purity, black-tar heroin.

The plight is hardly unique to rural New Mexico.

About 16 million Americans use illegal drugs, according to the latest
National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. Use has increased among both
teenagers and adults who abuse Ecstasy, marijuana, cocaine, painkillers,
tranquilizers, heroin.

Communities are feeling the effects. In tiny Willimantic, Conn., police
scour the streets for heroin traffickers and prostitutes working to fund
their habit. In nearly a dozen towns across Appalachia, methadone clinics
treat clients addicted to the painkiller OxyContin. In Midwestern
neighborhoods, police discover more methamphetamine labs every day: 2,725
last year in Missouri alone.

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy wants to reduce
nationwide drug use by 25 percent over the next five years. Deputy director
Mary Ann Solberg acknowledges it's an ambitious goal.

"We know we don't have a prayer unless each community across this country
works with us hand in hand," she told some 40 politicians, treatment
providers, retirees and recovered addicts at a meeting last month in Rio
Arriba County.

Yet her comments were met with some skepticism. Not unlike Renee Martinez,
Rio Arriba already has taken the first step. It readily admits it has a
problem. The hard part is getting clean.

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"Hey, Ness. Happy birthday, baby." Annette Valerio squats down, scoops up a
mound of dirt with a garden shovel and plants the paper plate that reads
"Happy Birthday" in a rainbow of colors.

She continues until her daughter's grave is wreathed in cheerful decor,
then sits on a bench and gazes at the photograph of a girl with hazel eyes
and ebony hair.

Venessa would have been 19. She would have graduated from high school,
finished her first year of college, perhaps found a boyfriend, been
building a life.

Her mother imagines all the missed moments even now, a decade after her
9-year-old was shot in the jugular by a heroin-addicted burglar who broke
into their home to steal, among other things, the syringes Venessa used to
treat her diabetes.

Annette was shot that September afternoon in 1993. Her daughter bled to
death in her arms.

Yet Annette feels assured that her daughter did not die in vain. With
Venessa's death and others, Rio Arriba began to recognize it faced an epidemic.

From the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains outside of Santa Fe,
Rio Arriba County stretches north along tributaries of the Rio Grande
through pastel-colored canyons to the Colorado line.

Faith and family are paramount. Each year, thousands of pilgrims walk for
miles to the Santuario de Chimayo on Good Friday to scoop handfuls of dirt
that many believe can heal. Grandparents accompany their children and
grandchildren.

Also handed down from one generation to the next: the curse of addiction.
Most say it began after the second World War, when soldiers returned home
to few jobs and little opportunity. The people turned first to alcohol.
Then, after the Korean War, some veterans came back addicted to
pharmaceuticals. Then came heroin, increased production just across the
border in Mexico offering a steady supply.

By the 1980s, Rio Arriba was "fully blown," as one recovered addict puts it.

Despite the growing problem, little was done to fight back. Police
resources were limited, and residents were scared. A few who tried to speak
out got threatening phone calls. Others were torn between wanting to help
and having to turn in a family member to do so.

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In 1995, Chimayo newcomer Bruce Richardson attended his first community
meeting about crime. When volunteers were sought to organize another
gathering, he stepped up. A few months later, the Chimayo Crime Prevention
Organization was born.

Through his committee, Richardson brought together a small cadre of
community leaders. With the help of county health administrator and
victims' advocates, they organized more meetings and marches. Eventually,
they grabbed the attention of the state and, finally, Congress.

In March 1999, Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico convened a Congressional
field hearing in Rio Arriba County. Six months later, armed with maps of
drug dealers' homes plotted by Richardson and his committee, state police
and federal agents descended on Chimayo and other villages in the county in
raid that netted 31 heroin traffickers.

It was quiet, for a while. But a new crop of dealers quickly moved in, and
some of those who were busted are already back out, says State Police Capt.
Quintin McShan, who oversees Rio Arriba County.

Along with the raids came new money for treatment and outreach - more than
$10 million in state and federal dollars. In December 1999, a nationally
recognized drug-treatment foundation opened an outreach-and-prevention
center in Espanola, a few miles from Chimayo.

Yet the center, Amistad de Nuevo Mexico, included no inpatient beds.
Amistad sent 52 clients to a residential facility in Arizona and reached
1,500 through outreach.

But spokesman Karl Moffatt acknowledges there's no real way to track success.

The county is renovating a 52-bed residential center north of Espanola and
hopes to open the doors this fall. Meanwhile, disease-prevention
specialists are working to teach addicts and their families how to use
Narcan, a substance that can reverse the effects of a heroin overdose.

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Rio Arriba is far from heaven, but it's not quite the hell it once was.
There is hope here.

Annette Valerio senses it when she talks to high-school students about her
Nessie and sees their tears fall. Phillip Martinez finds it in the rapt
audiences of addicts he tries to help.

You could even catch a glimpse of it in the vacant eyes of Renee Martinez
that morning as she scouted the methadone-cliwnic parking lot for enough
cash to buy her dose. On that day, she got her money and strolled out of
the clinic with a grin on her face.

Yet to truly curtail the culture of addiction, the people of Rio Arriba say
they must ultimately address its underlying causes: the lack of jobs and
opportunity, their faltering faith in the future.

Toward that end, they are focusing on the children. Two offshoots of the
Chimayo Crime Prevention Organization - a youth corps and local Boys and
Girls Club - launched programs in the past few years to provide mentoring
and activities for kids.

The day after the Boys and Girls Club dedicated a building adjacent to
Chimayo Elementary, about 30 children jumped rope and kicked a soccer ball
across the school gymnasium. A banner on the wall read: "Real friends don't
let friends take drugs."