MEXICO CITIES SEEING MORE DRUG USERS

TIJUANA, Mexico - Berenice Arellano Gil celebrated her 29th birthday by
doing what she does most days: She slipped $3 into another addict's hand on
a downtown street corner and bought a two-inch vial filled with crack cocaine.

"I feel like a dog running wild on the freeway, not knowing if I am going
to make it off the road alive," she said, cupping her hands around the
smoking white powder and inhaling deeply, letting the crack fill her lungs
and surge into her brain.

She opened her glassy eyes, looked toward the United States, beyond a metal
fence a few yards away, and her story tumbled out. She had a good life once
in Los Angeles, installing carpet for $10 an hour, but she got caught and
deported and despair led to crack, and at least now she has cut back and is
spending only $10 a day on her habit instead of the $100 she used to waste,
and she hates her job making $5 a day working in a restaurant but will
never, never, never again have sex with a stranger to make a few bucks for
crack, and you just can't believe how hard it is to get unhooked.

"It's my birthday, you know," she said.

Mexico used to think people like Arellano were an American nightmare. By
Mexico's reckoning, Americans were the ones using the drugs, and their
insatiable demand was the reason that violent cartels - which continue to
conduct daily assassinations on the border - existed here. Places like
Tijuana, where people didn't even use drugs, were suffering because
cokeheads from Malibu to Maine couldn't get enough, it was said.

But that's changing. Mexico is now not only the major transit point for
drugs shipped into the United States, it has a growing problem of its own.
While consumption here remains far below that in the United States, it
began climbing rapidly in the mid-1990s.

This gritty city of 1.2 million is Mexico's drug-use capital. Between 1993
and 1998, government surveys found a fivefold increase in the number of
people saying they had used drugs in the past month. For 1998, the last
year the survey was conducted, 15 percent of Tijuana youths said they had
tried cocaine, heroin or other drugs - three times the national average.

Since then, far more people have begun trying drugs, particularly crystal
methamphetamine.

"It's a dramatic problem affecting the quality of life here," said Victor
Clark Alfaro, a prominent human rights advocate. "Many of these people
steal to get money for drugs. People are afraid of what people will do when
they are high on crack and crystal meth."

The increased drug use is generally traced to a change in the practices of
Mexican traffickers who ship drugs into the United States. In the
mid-1990s, according to Mexican law enforcement officials, traffickers
started paying local employees - those who handled such jobs as fueling
planes and renting warehouses - partly in drugs. Those people needed to
create their own market, and they began selling drugs in their home towns.

And drugs are cheaper. Drugs used to be beyond the means of poor youths
from the Tijuana barrios, but a vial of crack now sells for as little as
$2, and a heroin injection costs $5 to $10, depending on quality, according
to interviews with addicts here. They said the most popular drug is the
cheapest: crystal methamphetamine, or "ice," a synthetic drug that goes for
$1 to $2 a hit.

Some Mexican law enforcement officials say the problem has become far worse
since the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States. U.S. border
security has sharply increased, making it harder for the cartels to move
drugs across the border. That has led to concern that the backlog is being
dumped in Mexican towns, where youths have a growing appetite for drugs.
U.S. law enforcement officials say they doubt the border security has
curtailed drug trafficking, noting that U.S. street prices for drugs
haven't risen, a sign of steady supply.