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Two decades after ravaging U.S., crack cocaine sweeps Mexico

MERIDA, Mexico — He wanted peace and quiet, an escape from the craziness of life in Mexico City and the temptations of a growing cocaine habit.

That's what led Arturo, a 46-year-old sound engineer, to bring his wife and two children to live in this ancient Mayan city, with its whitewashed buildings surrounded by the fragrant lowland jungles of the Yucatan peninsula.

But four years after his arrival in Merida, Arturo was introduced to crack.

"Someone told me, when you use crack, then you will truly know what drugs are," remembers Arturo, who asked that his last name not be revealed in this article. Soon he was selling his sound equipment and his wife's jewelry to feed his habit.

His family nearly fell apart. "I came here fleeing, looking for a solution," said Arturo, now a patient in Merida drug rehabilitation clinic. "But this drug is everywhere."

For decades, the conventional wisdom has been that Mexico's drug problem is the United States. While drug cartels staged bloody battles for control of the smuggling routes to the north, Mexico's own drug consumption was among the lowest in the Western hemisphere.

But officials say Mexico is now facing its own homegrown drug epidemic, spearheaded by an alarming increase in crack use throughout the country. Some officials worry that the Mexico may be headed for the type of violence the introduction of crack visited upon U.S. cities in the 1980s.

"It puts us in the worst of two worlds," said Jorge Chabat, a Mexico City political analyst and expert on drug trafficking. "We're still a transit and producing country, but now we are a consumer country as well."

Mexico is largely unprepared to deal with this new domestic drug problem, officials and analysts said.

The country's legal and law enforcement systems, accustomed to combating the large-scale drug wars against the drug trafficking cartels, are unwieldy. Local agencies are constitutionally prohibited from investigating drug crimes and Mexico's drug possession laws don't adequately address domestic distribution.

The rapid spread of domestic drug use is requiring new ways of thinking: Mexicans have coined a word to describe the phenomenon, "narcomenudeo," or retail drug dealing, to differentiate it from traditional narco-trafficking. Lawmakers are studying wholesale changes to the nation's drug laws.

Schools in large cities have begun inspecting backpacks as youth drug consumption numbers soar. Mexican newspapers have begun reporting on a new trend: homes used by addicts to buy drugs and get high — the traditional crack house.

Federal prosecutors say domestic drug deals have nearly tripled in Mexico in the last four years, from 929 cases in 2001 to 2,500 in 2004..

In Mexico City, law enforcement officials saying there now exist 2,111 illegal drug distribution points, compared to 700 in 2000. In March, officials assembled the first domestic drug task forces in this city of 20 million.

Joel Ortega, Mexico City's police chief, says a ton-and-a-half of cocaine and crack are consumed per month in Mexico's capital and warns of border-like violence in the cities.

"The small gangs are imitating the way that drug cartels operate in other places, and we have to view this with sufficient caution because they are competing for territory with ferocity," Ortega recently told reporters.

For reasons not entirely clear to police, the city of Merida, on the other side of the Yucatan peninsula from Cancun, has one of the highest rates of crack use in Mexico, according to a study by the government-run Center for Juvenile Integration. Between 2001 and 2003, the percentage of drug treatment patients in Merida who used crack jumped from 4 percent to just over 36 percent.

Nationwide, crack use among patients leapt from 10.5 percent to 18.7 percent at a time when consumption rates for powder cocaine and marijuana are declining. Officials say the jump was largely attributable to increases in the far-flung locales like the Yucatan peninsula and Chiapas.

The increase in crack use among rehab patients is alarming because it is

often an indicator of trends likely to hit the larger population, analysts

said. In recent years, crack has almost completely displaced powder cocaine on Merida's streets, former users say.

"Many people come here because the levels of violence are low," said Victor Ramon Roa Munoz, director of the Merida chapter of Center for Juvenile Integration. "But we run the risk that drugs and crack in particular will increase that violence."

Experts say the increased presence of drugs in Mexico began with the downfall of the large Colombian cartels in the 1980s and '90s. The newer cartels began paying for the transportation of their drugs, largely cocaine, with drugs instead of money. "That made it necessary to transfer the cocaine into money locally," said Ricardo Gluyas Millan, an investigator at Mexico City's National Institute of Penal Sciences.

President Vicente Fox's government has also claimed some responsibility for the glut of drugs available domestically in Mexico, saying that increased effectiveness in battling the cartels has prevented the large groups from getting all their cargo across the border and into the United States.

With more drugs available in Mexico, he told foreign reporters in March, there has been more domestic drug use.

But while increased availability and low prices have helped fuel this rise, observers say a changing Mexican society is also a factor.

In Merida, Roa points to a complex stew: the city's proximity to Cancun and the influence of foreign tourists; high levels of immigration to the United States and residents who bring back drug habits; and high unemployment levels leading to feelings of desperation.

At the core, Roa says, is the breakup of traditional family and community roles that for decades helped insulate the largely indigenous peoples of the Yucatan from hard drug use.

"There is an extreme poverty that drives many of the Maya peoples to come to the cities for work," Roa said. "What they find in the cities is collision of cultures and values."

That's exactly what the family of Puc, a tough-looking 25-year-old with a pockmarked face and backwards baseball cap, found when they migrated to Merida from one of the many largely indigenous pueblos that encircle the city. Puc is not his real name. He asked to be identified by a pseudonym for this article in order to protect his family.

"I didn't know anything about crack," said Puc, a patient at the Merida drug rehab center who asked that his real name not be used. The oldest of three children, Puc began smoking marijuana shortly after being expelled from school at the age of 12. He fell in with a crew that sold pot and cocaine, but soon began getting high on the drugs he was supposed to be selling.

When crack emerged on the scene, it was a novelty — he knew little of the highly addictive nature of the drug. He easily hid his habit from his parents and bought drugs with the money they gave him to attend classes at a design school.

The breaking point came when he spent a sleepless week locked in a house with three other addicts, consuming nothing but water and crack.

After that experience, he finally told his shocked and confused parents that he was a crack addict and needed help.

"My father said, 'you're crazy, what are you smoking?" Puc said. "I told him, it's a rock, but you smoke it. But my parents, they're from the pueblo, they didn't understand."

Puc showed his father his glass pipe and a rock. In desperation, he smoked the crack in front of his father. "I said, 'I'm not crazy, I'm dying.'"

As much as Puc and his parents were unprepared for crack, Mexico's vast judicial and law enforcement machinery has been unprepared to handle the growing domestic drug problem.

A number of law enforcement officials say Mexico's constitutional ban on local and state agencies investigating drug crimes is hampering a domestic crackdown.

Drug policing has been left to federal policing agencies and the military under the argument that only they have the resources needed to tackle the confrontation with well-armed and financed drug cartels.

Officials have also been loathe to turn over drug duties to the lower-paid locals, who, the argument goes, would be more susceptible to corruption.

But when it comes to street drug dealing and neighborhood gangs, the locals are usually in a far better position to investigate.

The Mexican Attorney General's Office is already overwhelmed with the war it's fighting, Chabat said. "So probably if they receive a report from the local police in Ciudad Juarez that a guy is selling drugs on the corner, that situation will probably be priority number 454. Probably nothing is going to happen. It's not very logical that (local law enforcement) do nothing if the problem is right in front of their eyes."

Law enforcement officials also want to strengthen possession laws, which they say are used as loopholes by domestic dealers. Mexican law states that addicts who are arrested with a quantity considered strictly for personal use should not be prosecuted, but rather directed to health and drug treatment officials.

"A person is arrested with drugs and then you have to let them go because they claim to be an addict and that the drug was exclusively for consumption," said Assistant Attorney General Gilberto Higuera Bernal, in a March interview with the Reforma newspaper.

But civil rights groups are warning that Mexico runs the risk of criminalizing addiction, as the United States does, and filling already crowded jails with non-violent addicts.

Mexico's Congress is studying far-reaching changes to drug laws, but did not come to an agreement before the last session ended in April.

But if Mexico has one advantage as it grapples with its domestic drug problem and spike in crack use, it's that it can look to the examples of the United States and other countries for situations to avoid.

"We're at a time where we can prevent many of the consequences that we know this type of drug brings," said Roa in Merida.