MEXICAN YOUTHS FALL INTO CRACK-COCAINE ABYSS

Cheap At $2 A Rock, It's A National Plight

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. Abuse used to be largely confined to the northern Mexican
states from which U.S. cocaine smuggling operations were launched. Now it
has seeped south to big 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 so cheap that it is luring
street kids away from sniffing solvents.

The problem has deep roots, but the security crackdown on the U.S.-Mexican
border since Sept. 11 intensified it, Mexican drug officials say. 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. As evidence, 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.

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
told Knight Ridder Newspapers. U.S. coke dealers are "diluting it to make it
go further," he said.

In Mexico City's outskirts, at a group therapy session for parents of drug
addicts, Pedro Bernal Garcia rues the consequences. The working-class father
explains that 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 in unison, 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 500,000 of them
are hard-core drug addicts, said Guido Belsasso, Mexico's anti-addictions
czar, in a recent interview at the National Addictions Advisory Board.
Mexico's population is about 100 million.

According to Health Ministry studies, more than 5 percent of Mexicans age 12
to 65 have tried illicit drugs. That's nothing like the 39 percent rate for
Americans reported by U.S. drug abuse agencies. But it is a troubling number
for a conservative country more accustomed to alcoholism than drug abuse.

Traditionally, poor Mexicans and street addicts got high by sniffing
solvents such as paint thinner splashed on a rag. For the middle class,
marijuana was the drug of choice. The Health Ministry, in its latest
antidrug action plan, warns that cocaine "has a consumption level now higher
than both of them."

The cocaine problem "no longer belongs to one social class. It used to
belong to the middle and upper classes," said Victor Guisa Cruz, general
director of Mexico's 70 government-run rehabilitation centers, called
Juvenile Integration Centers.

Historically, traffickers brought Colombian cocaine to the United States via
the Florida and gulf coasts. 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.

"If you have a 1 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," said
Belsasso, the anti-addictions czar. "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 Knight Ridder reporter. The driver, wearing a
police uniform, holds a lighted 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."

Near one downtown food market, addicted children and teenagers smoke rocks
of cocaine just doors away from the local police precinct headquarters.

Cocaine "used to be just for adults, but now kids can get it easily," said
Marta Rodriguez Lopez, 41, a street addict who acts as den mother to the
group of ragged, drug-addicted street kids. "They sell it to them like it
was chocolate."

One of them is Lionel, 14, who takes a lighter to a broken radio antenna and
lights up a rock of cocaine inside. His long eyelashes flutter over drooping
eyes as he takes a hit of cocaine about the time most people have their
first cup of coffee.

Lionel and other street kids say police are often involved in selling
cocaine, or give them drugs and solvents in exchange for taking them to the
station to pad the arrest reports.

Under a bridge in another Mexico City neighborhood, 19-year-old Jonathan
tells how he abandoned an upper-middle-class home for the tough life of a
cocaine addict on the streets. He tried three months of treatment but said
it failed to quell his urge for cocaine.

"It's just tremendous. I can't stay off it," he said.