Tijuana Streets Teem With Addicted Youths

By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service

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 that 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 is 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
drug consumption in Mexico is still far below that in the United States, it began climbing in the mid-1990s at an alarming rate.

This gritty city of 1.2 million is Mexico's drug-use capital. Between 1993 and 1998, government surveys found a five-fold 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 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." He said poor addicts are most visible because they often use drugs in
the street. But he said middle-class children are taking them, too -- in homes and discos and at parties, out of the public eye.

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, the 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.

At the same time, the price of cocaine and other drugs has fallen. 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 their cocaine, marijuana and heroin 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. They note that U.S. street prices for drugs have not 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 there include dousing addicts with ice-cold water, beating them and chaining
them to make sure they don't flee. Several Tijuana newspapers recently ran photos of teenage addicts chained down in one of the centers. The youths had been
placed there with the permission of their parents, who said they didn't 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," said Clark Alfaro. "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."

A recent tour of open-air drug markets in Tijuana found many people inhaling crystal meth or crack and a few injecting heroin. Most of the users were in their
twenties. One man sat on the curb on Ninos Heroes Street, the hood of a parka pulled over his face on a day when the temperature was near 80 degrees, a vial of
crack cupped in his hands.

A half-block away, Manuel Lopez, 32, slouched against an abandoned house, high on a combination of crystal meth and crack, known as a "speedball." He was too
incoherent to speak. Another man in much the same condition wandered into traffic on International Highway, nearly getting run over before his friends pulled him
back.

Police in Tijuana have long been connected to major drug traffickers. Now those corrupt links extend to street-corner drug dealers, who say that association has
created new bribery patterns.

Money paid to the police by drug cartels is often carefully orchestrated. High-ranking officers decide how big the bribe should be, and how it should be distributed
within the ranks. But now cops on the street are taking "express bribes" from local dealers, pocketing a relatively small amount of money without consulting or sharing
with other officers. One dealer said that as the recession has set in, more police officers have become open to taking bribes to look the other way.

Mexican police officials deny publicly that their officers take bribes. But many officers on the street readily admit that they take bribes to augment their low salaries.

Clark Alfaro said a man who manufactures crystal meth in a Tijuana laboratory recently complained to him that he had paid the police a $9,000 bribe because they
threatened to shut down his lab. The man was upset because the cops wanted $20,000 and he had to bargain hard to bring down their price.

                                               © 2001 The Washington Post