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MEXICO
Drug use in Mexico increasing at `truly alarming rates'Mexican officials said drug use has skyrocketed as cartels do more business locally rather than shipping drugs north.
BY MARK STEVENSON
Associated Press
MEXICO CITY - Mexico's attorney general said an alarming increase in drug use in Mexico is leading cartels to fight primarily for markets and territory rather than shipping routes, as cocaine finds an easier market here than in the United States.

Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora also said Tuesday that a group of alleged drug traffickers extradited to the U.S. over the weekend could be returned to Mexican prisons once they are tried abroad, noting ``that possibility has not been discarded.''

His comments to congressional members that some of the 15 extradited late Friday might wind up back in Mexico to serve unfinished sentences or face new trials seemed at odds with the expectations of U.S. officials, who apparently plan to keep them for life.

On Monday, Karen Tandy, chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said that ''on behalf of the DEA, I have one last thing to say to these 15 criminals: Welcome to the first day of the rest of your lives.'' Those extradited to the U.S. include alleged drug lords like Osiel Cárdenas and Héctor Palma Salazar.

POLICY IN QUESTION

A ''temporary extradition'' arrangement between the two countries allows suspects serving prison sentences in Mexico to be sent north for trial. But they must return to Mexico to finish out their sentences here. However, a top Mexican law enforcement official who wasn't authorized to give his name said President Felipe Calderón had decided that Friday's extraditions didn't fall under that accord.

Despite Mexico's massive anti-drug raids, Medina Mora said that drug cartels still threaten ''government sovereignty and control'' in some regions, in part because they do more business locally now, rather than just shipping most drugs north as in the past.

''The consumption of hard drugs is increasing at truly alarming rates . . . at rates of as much as 20 percent annually,'' Medina Mora said during testimony before lawmakers.

``Changing international [drug] market conditions have not only caused an increase in violence as they fight for markets, but have also focused organized criminal groups more toward the domestic market.''

That has forced Mexico to shift its anti-drug efforts toward ''a new paradigm,'' Medina Mora said.

TOUGHER TO TRACK

In the past, authorities focused on arresting top drug lords, a move that often served to temporarily disrupt the chain of command on shipment routes they controlled.

But now that money and drugs follow a somewhat more diffuse network of local and international sales, the government has decided to use an approach oriented toward the drug economy.

The new campaign, which includes sending thousands of federal police and soldiers into several key strongholds, is aimed at ``breaking up the areas of power, moneymaking and privilege.''

Medina Mora said that in Mexico, lawyers for drug traffickers carry messages from their clients to their henchmen on the outside. Breaking up such contacts, he said, was part of a ''new trend'' in law enforcement, and one of the reasons for the extraditions.