A Meth Scourge In A Mexican Pueblo
Methamphetamine is a soaring problem in small town Mexico
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Carlos first smoked crystal meth when he was 14 in the classroom of his secondary school in Xalatlaco, a working class town an hour west of Mexico City. The teacher had gone out and his friend whipped out a glass pipe and lit up the flakes of crystal while other kids were laughing. Carlos took a puff and felt great. “It gives you a euphoria, confidence,” he tells me.
He was soon smoking methamphetamine daily; after school he sold baseball caps at a stall for money and he would hawk meth to his friends to support his habit. He found he no longer felt the euphoria but needed to puff meth to stop feeling depressed.
When Carlos’ parents realized he had a problem, they marched him down to a local rehab, which are known here as anexos and are privately-run places that keep the patients interned for months. He went in voluntarily, but parents can ask for their children to be taken forcefully to the anexos, some even in handcuffs.
Carlos tells me his story as we sit in the courtyard of an anexo in Xalatlaco called “Una nueva luz en mi camino,” or “A new light in my path.” He is now 16, a good-looking kid with a buzz cut, and has been in rehab multiple times but hopes that this time he will stay clean. He is sitting among a dozen others, from teenagers to middle-aged guys, recounting how they developed substance abuse problems in Xalatlaco, or in Mexico City where many go to work.
Some describe how they mix drug abuse with alcoholism and some of the older guys were hooked before on crack cocaine. But the dominant drug is now meth, which is cheap, selling for 100 pesos, or $6, a bag in Xalatlaco. It also has the benefit that you can still go to work when you smoke it, and it makes you pass the time easier sweating in factories or long days on market stalls or cutting crops in the fields.
The guys refer to meth as “cristal,” meaning crystal, “hielo,” meaning ice, or “grillo,” meaning cricket. When I tell them my last name is Grillo, laughter ripples through the courtyard, the high walls and locked gates surrounding us.
Mexican narcos first started cooking meth in volume for the gringos after the U.S Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005 clamped down on the ingredients north of the Rio Grande. Traffickers shipped in precursors from China to Mexico’s Pacific ports and built super labs in the countryside. Like with cocaine back in the day, narcos originally swore not to vend it to their own people, and one of the first major meth lords was Nazario “The Maddest One” Moreno who banned ice sales in his home state of Michoacán.
However, big profits made sure narcos broke these rules and meth spilled from cartel labs to a growing domestic market; one study found an increase of more than 400 percent for treatment of meth use in Mexico over a decade. After burning through border cities and drug-producing areas, meth is hitting small towns like Xalatlaco that have no traditional connection to the narco trade.
“We Don’t Allow Cartels Here”
A town of 30,000 people, Xalatlaco (pronounced ha-lat-laco) sits amid hills of pine trees close to parks where Mexico City chilangos go at weekends. Many from Xalatlaco work in stalls in the capital, selling tamales, tortas or orange juice. In fact, a Xalatlaco guy that I buy juice from in Mexico City first told me about the drug problem in his hometown and connected me to locals to investigate it.
The guys I speak to in the anexo say the meth problem is much worse than Mexico’s official stats show. When I ask how many boys from a classroom in Xalatlaco will end up smoking meth, they say…
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