AS BORDER SECURITY RISES, SO DOES USE OF DRUGS IN MEXICO

Cocaine That Once Flowed Through Nation To The U.S. Is Now Likely To Stop There

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. But 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 children 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
point to the high purity of cocaine seized recently, 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.

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, ages 27 and 24, are
imprisoned for stealing to feed their cocaine habits.

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

Mexico has at least 2.5 million drug users, and at least half a million of
them are 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 12 to
65 years old have tried illicit drugs. That's small compared with the 39
percent rate for Americans reported by U.S. agencies, but it's a troubling
number for a conservative country more accustomed to alcoholism than drug
abuse.

Historically, traffickers brought Colombian cocaine to the United States by
way of the Florida and Gulf coasts. More effective interdiction in those
areas during the 1990s compelled Colombian traffickers to seek other
routes. They often turned to Mexican marijuana traffickers and made Mexico
the principal route for 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
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. "That is the new scene in Mexico City."