LOWER COST, U.S. PATROLS CAUSE RISE IN MEXICAN COCAINE USE

Families Struggle With New Crisis

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, powdered 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's 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 the Mercury News. 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 Garca 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 half a million
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.

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 make 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.

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 Mercury News reporter. The driver, wearing a
police uniform, holds a lit 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, a group of 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 Rodrguez 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."