Mexico struggling with rising drug use

Thu., Oct. 16, 2008

By Ken Ellingwood Los Angeles Times

New source of ephedrine

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – Mexican traffickers have become the main suppliers of methamphetamine to the United States. But a crackdown in Mexico has squeezed supplies of ephedrine from Asia, leading drug gangs to seek their raw material in Argentina, a nation with a robust pharmaceutical industry, few controls and a reputation for corrupt police and customs inspectors.

“The Mexican trafficking organizations already have smuggling routes set up throughout South America for moving cocaine,” said Special Agent Michael Sanders, a spokesman in Washington for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. “So traffickers can use the same routes and techniques to move ephedrine.”

Methamphetamine is a multibillion-dollar industry in the United States, though its use is believed to have leveled off since the 1990s.

HUITZILA, Mexico – Once mainly a smuggling corridor for drugs heading to the United States, Mexico is grappling with the effects of a fast-rising addiction rate as relatively cheap versions of cocaine and methamphetamine find a market south of the border. Experts say the supply has increased as U.S. enforcement on the border has made it more difficult to move illegal drugs north.

A recent government survey of drug use shows Mexicans are trying drugs, and getting hooked, earlier and more often. The number of people who said they had tried drugs rose by more than 25 percent, to 4.5 million, since the last survey in 2002. More than 460,000 Mexicans are addicted to drugs, a 51 percent jump from six years ago, according to preliminary results of the survey released last month.

Those tallies are undoubtedly low. Officials said safety considerations prevented them from querying residents in two key drug-trafficking states, Sinaloa and Baja California, and hindered data collection in three others.

Growing consumption here presents a difficult new front in President Felipe Calderon’s war on drug traffickers, declared in December 2006. There are signs that the street trade, known as “narcomenudeo,” is adding to overall drug violence that has killed more than 3,000 people nationwide this year. Analysts say the well-armed gangs that have fought each other for control of key international drug-smuggling routes are battling over the market inside Mexico as well.

The slaying of the mayor of a resort town outside Mexico City this month was in part linked to his resistance to local drug sales, authorities said. Media reports said 12 men whose headless bodies turned up in the Yucatan peninsula in August may have been killed as part of a narcomenudeo turf war.

Mexican leaders, who for many years have pointed an accusing finger toward the United States when talking about drug use, now acknowledge their nation’s own problem.

“It is clear to everyone that our nation has stopped being a transit country for drugs going to the United States and become an important market as well,” Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said recently. “We are experiencing a phenomenon of greater drug supplies in the streets, at relatively accessible prices.”

Addiction is reaching all corners of a nation that is poorly equipped to cope. Some rural Mexican communities have watched drug use rise after migrant workers returned from the United States with a new appetite for cocaine and other addictive substances.

Methamphetamine, a synthetic drug, is manufactured in Mexico and widely available. Officials in the northern border state of Sonora say consumption of crystal methamphetamine has quadrupled since 2002. They label drug use the state’s biggest public-health threat.

In interviews, addicts confirm that illegal drugs are readily available and often less expensive than a six-pack of beer. Crack cocaine, known in Spanish as “piedra,” or rock, sells for as little as $3 a hit. Powder cocaine, folded into a stamp-size paper bundle is diluted with aspirin or other chemicals and sold for $5 or less.

In Mexico City’s poorest neighborhoods, such as the Iztapalapa and Tepito sections, dealers work from mom-and-pop stores, grimy housing projects and street corners.

“It’s like a plague that is invading us,” complained Ulises Ocampo, a neighborhood activist in the Tlalpan section of southern Mexico City.

Calderon has proposed giving arrestees who are addicts or those caught with small amounts of drugs a choice of treatment rather than prison. The measure would also give local police a bigger role in trying to erase small-time drug dealing, at a time when federal forces are strained.