Thread: In Mexico, lessons of addiction are stark

In Mexico, lessons of addiction are stark

Updated 1h 17m ago
By Sergio Solache, Special for USA TODAY

MEXICO CITY — Leonardo Aguilar lives under a bridge in Mexico City. To make money for food, he scatters shards of broken glass in subway cars and lies on them in exchange for a few pesos from shocked commuters.
When Aguilar, 20, needs to forget the pain, the hunger and the blood running down his arms, he sucks on the fumes from a mona, a scrap of cloth soaked with industrial solvents.

"This will last me 10 or 15 minutes," he says, wetting the rag from a soda bottle filled with clear liquid and holding it to his mouth. "I like marijuana better … but it's more expensive."

Despite the tons of narcotics moving through Mexico, inhalants remain the drug of choice for many Mexicans, offering a stark lesson in the economics of addiction even as the country wages a bloody battle against drug cartels.

Marijuana and crack cocaine are simply too expensive for many poor people here, even after recent efforts by drug cartels to cultivate a market in border cities. Powdered cocaine and heroin are seen as drugs for rich Americans.

Solvents containing the powerful intoxicant toluene are cheap and legal to buy. Their use is growing, especially in the large cities of central Mexico.

The number of inhalant users rose 70% from 2002 to 2008, from 314,760 to 533,797, according to Mexico's Health Secretariat. The number of people checking into drug treatment centers rose 80% during the same period, from 4,050 to 7,293.

The government has opened more than 300 drug treatment centers since 2007 and launched several anti-drug ad campaigns as part of President Felipe Calderón's effort against drugs. The campaigns have devoted little attention to inhalants, says Moisés Salazar, an addiction expert at Casa Alianza, a Mexico City charity.

The chemicals damage brain cells, causing learning disabilities, speech problems and difficulty walking. They can attack the kidneys, liver and heart. Toluene is not as physically addictive as crack, heroin or methamphetamine, but for many users, it becomes a dangerous crutch, clouding their thinking and keeping them on the street, Salazar says.

"It alters their perceptions, makes them laugh, and life seems less harsh," says Juan Ramiro Vázquez, director of a government drug treatment center in Mexico City.

Inhalants are cheap, an important factor in a country where the minimum wage is $4.50 a day and many homeless people live on less than a dollar a day.

For 15 pesos, about $1.18, a user can buy a charco, or "puddle," of about 3 ounces of toluene — enough to stay high all day. In comparison, a few grams of marijuana (enough for one marijuana cigarette) costs 20 pesos, or $1.57, and the effects last only a few hours. A rock of crack cocaine is even more expensive at $4, and the high lasts only 15 minutes.

On Panaderos Street, a notorious drug market in central Mexico City, drug dealers sell solvent mixed with cinnamon oil or air fresheners to hide the smell of toluene.

In the Insurgentes Traffic Circle in downtown Mexico City, Sharid Guillén, 21, played cards with other inhalant users. She held the cards in her right hand and her mona in her left. In Spanish, a mona is a rag used for varnishing wood.

Nearby, empty yellow-and-red bottles of plumbing cleaner littered an abandoned food kiosk.

Guillén opened her purse to show a plastic bottle filled with the solvent.

She says, "I want to stop using it, but I can't."

Contributing: Chris Hawley, USA TODAY

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2010 ... icts_N.htm

Solvents containing the powerful intoxicant toluene are cheap and legal to buy.

Toluene is the ingredient in model car and airplane glue that kids used to sniff in the U.S.
It is also a paint thinner in the paint that some people used to huff in the U.S.
I don't know if people still do that in the U.S. or if they killed themselves off by doing it.