COCAINE THEIR PROBLEM, TOO, MEXICANS DISCOVER

MEXICO CITY - After years of dismissing cocaine as a U.S. problem, Mexicans
are finding that it's their problem, too.

Government drug treatment clinics that saw 3,000 abusers a year in the
1990s now see 50,000 a year. Abuse used to be largely confined to the
northern Mexican states from which U.S. cocaine smuggling operations were
launched. Now it has spread south to larger cities such as Mexico City and
Guadalajara.

There, powder cocaine, with its high price limiting its use to Mexico's
upper classes, has given way to $2-a-rock crack that is luring street kids
away from sniffing solvents.

While the problem has deep roots, Mexican drug officials say the security
crackdown on the U.S.-Mexican border since Sept. 11 has intensified it.
They say smugglers are finding it harder to move cocaine into the United
States and instead are selling it in Mexico -- at rock-bottom prices. They
cite the high purity of cocaine recently seized, suggesting that smugglers
are selling the drug before squeezing out the extra profit derived from
cutting it.

ENFORCEMENT

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration chief Asa Hutchinson corroborates the
theory that tighter border enforcement is responsible. Cocaine purity fell
9 percent last year in the United States, reflecting tight supply,
Hutchinson said in an interview. U.S. coke dealers are "diluting it to make
it go further," he said.

At a group therapy session for parents of drug addicts outside Mexico City,
Pedro Bernal Garcia rues the consequences. The working class father says he
thought Mexico was only a transit country for Colombian cocaine bound for
the United States.

"We are just so sad because we don't want to accept that our kids have
fallen into drugs," said Bernal, whose two sons, aged 27 and 24, are
imprisoned for stealing to feed their cocaine habits.

As other parents nod, he adds something many U.S. families already know:
"This is a global problem."

Mexico now has at least 2.5 million drug users and at least half a million
of them are hard-core addicts, said Guido Belsasso, who heads Mexico's
anti-addiction effort, at a meeting of the National Addictions Advisory
Board. Mexico's population is about 100 million.

According to Health Ministry studies, more than 5 percent of Mexicans aged
12 to 65 have tried illicit drugs, far below the 39 percent rate for
Americans reported by U.S. drug abuse agencies. But it's a troubling number
for a conservative country more accustomed to alcoholism than drug abuse.

NEW ROUTE

Historically, traffickers brought Colombian cocaine to the United States
through Florida and other Gulf states. More effective interdiction in those
areas during the 1990s compelled Colombian traffickers to seek other
routes. They often partnered with Mexican marijuana traffickers and made
Mexico the principal transit route for U.S.-bound cocaine.

Along the way, Colombians began paying with cocaine instead of money. What
Mexican cartels couldn't get across the border they began selling in Mexico.

"In the past two years, they've been smoking rocks [of cocaine]. It is
incredibly cheap and very easy to get," said Mari Rouss Villegas, assistant
to the director of Casa Alianza, a group in Mexico City that works with
drug-addicted street children. It is affiliated with Covenant House, a New
York charity.

KIDS GET HOOKED

"If you have a one-kilogram [2.2-pound] block of cocaine, you can't go to
the bank and cash it out. That's how kids 7, 8 and 9 are getting hooked,"
Belsasso said. "That is the new scene in Mexico City."

Police complicity in the drug trade is part of the problem. On Reforma,
Mexico City's main boulevard, the driver of a police tractor-trailer rig
carrying horses passes a reporter. The driver, wearing a police uniform,
holds a marijuana cigarette the size of a cigar. Mexican newspapers report
almost daily about police on the payroll of drug traffickers.

"I think if kids know where to find the drugs, then certainly the
authorities must know this," said Villegas of Casa Alianza. "It is a bit
like the authorities are closing their eyes."