MEXICO CONFRONTS ITS DRUG PROBLEM

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 fast. Mexico is now not only the major transit point
for drugs shipped into the United States, it has a growing demand problem
of its own. While consumption here remains far below that in the United
States, it began climbing at an alarming rate 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. There are now hundreds of Tijuana crack houses, alleyways
and street corners where people gather to snort, smoke or inject drugs.

"It's a dramatic problem affecting the quality of life here," said Victor
Clark Alfaro, a 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."

Poor addicts are most visible because they often use drugs in the street,
he said. But middle-class children are taking them, too: in homes and
discos and at parties.

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 that border security has
curtailed drug trafficking, noting that U.S. street prices for drugs
haven't risen, a sign of steady supply.

But Pedro Jose Penaloza, who oversees crime prevention efforts in Mexico's
attorney general's office, recently said that "the consumption of cocaine
in the entire country has risen alarmingly since the Sept. 11 attacks." He
said the "sealing of the northern border by the United States" has led
traffickers to drop the price of cocaine and other drugs normally destined
for the United States and flood the market in Mexico.

In Mexico, drug consumption is seen largely as a health problem and is
rarely prosecuted. In most places, it is not a crime to consume small
amounts. But despite concern over health, the government has devoted little
money to treatment or rehabilitation, focusing instead on prevention
efforts, which are far less expensive.

Clark Alfaro said there are about 80,000 addicts in Tijuana and the city's
50 private rehabilitation centers have room for 3,000. To many, these
places, often run by former addicts or church workers with no formal
training in rehabilitation, are notorious for harsh treatment.

Two people who have been treated in such centers said in interviews that
techniques in private centers include dousing addicts with ice- cold water,
beating them and chaining them to make sure they do not flee. Several
Tijuana newspapers recently ran photos of teen-age addicts chained down in
one of the centers. The youths had been placed there with the permission of
their parents, who said they did not know where else to turn.

Such techniques are "not uncommon" in the private centers, said Enrique
Durantes, a psychiatrist who heads Tijuana's drug prevention program in the
city's health ministry. "We are totally against this method."

He said more federal funding is desperately needed to open rehabilitation
centers that use accepted treatment techniques. Last year, the federal
government issued national regulations and guidelines for drug
rehabilitation centers, but officials said there has been little effort to
enforce them.

"The government is leaving in the hands of (private groups) the process of
rehabilitation," Alfaro said. "They are closing their eyes to human-rights
violations that occur there."

Arellano, the crack addict, said she would not enter a private
rehabilitation center. "They are horrible. It's not like you have in the
States. No, no, never, never, will I go into one of those places. I must
try to get unhooked myself."