Monday,
February 1, 2010
Growing Drug Abuse in Mexico adds to Crime and Violence
Frontera NorteSur
During
a recent debate on Mexican television, media personality Joaquin Lopez-Doriga repeated a common explanation of the roots of
the narco-violence unsettling his nation. If illegal drug consumption in the US stopped, Lopez-Doriga said, the principal
cause of violence would go up in smoke. As the face of Televisa, one arm of the duopoly that dominates Mexico's airwaves,
Lopez-Doriga, or "El Maestro" as he is sometimes called, is an influential commentator on the social and political landscape
of his country.
To one degree or another, Lopez-Doriga's analysis is shared by major media north of the border that
frame the violence as the result of intense competition over controlling smuggling routes into the US, or as a desperate reaction
to an unprecedented crackdown on drug trafficking by the Calderon administration.
But new numbers quoted by a high-ranking
Mexican law enforcement official challenge the pundits. Testifying before the Mexican Congress last week, Public Security
Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna noted a significant increase in drug consumption in Mexico during the last decade, especially
in terms of cocaine and methamphetamine use.
According to Garcia, methamphetamine use quadrupled in a ten-year
period, while cocaine consumption tripled just in the two-year period from 2006 to 2008. Charged with overseeing much of the
drug war, Garcia called drug abuse a "very important issue" that must be tackled in Mexico.
A 2009 United Nations report
estimated 1.7 million Mexicans, or about 2.4 percent of the population, use cocaine. In comparison with the US, where
an estimated 88 tons of cocaine are consumed annually, Mexico, with about one-third of the population as its northern neighbor,
consumes an estimated 27.65 tons of the drug every year. If the UN's numbers are fairly accurate, Mexico is rapidly catching
up to the US as a leading consumer of cocaine.
In other annual indices of hard drug use, Mexicans reportedly consume
3.9 tons of heroin and 4.2 tons of amphetamines and Ecstasy. At the same time, more than three million Mexicans, or about
4.2 percent of the population, are users of marijuana.
Garcia's warnings on growing domestic drug consumption are not
new. For example, a 2007 study by the Secretariat of Public Education and the Juan Ramon de la Fuente National Institute of
Psychiatry reported that drug abuse among groups of middle and high school students in certain Mexican cities was proportionally
higher than in other sectors of the population.
A better understanding of contemporary narco-violence should consider
how surges in domestic Mexican drug consumption coincide with the spread of bloodshed from traditional border and rural hotspots
to cities and towns across the country.
Drug-related violence picked up during the administration of former President
Vicente Fox, and then intensified after Felipe Calderon took office in late 2006. Generally young, many of the thousands of
people slaughtered since December 2006 were addicts, small-time dealers or others involved in the lower-end of the drug business.
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Additional
source: Agencia Reforma, January 22, 2010. Article by Luis Brito.
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Frontera NorteSur (FNS)
Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico
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Reprinted
with authorization from Frontera NorteSur, a free, on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news source; translation FNS
