On clear evenings, they can see the bright lights of the city center, the maquilas where many of them used to work and the Rio Grande winding its way to the east.

Jose Alfredo Martinez, a thin, 36-year-old father of two struggling with a crack addiction, is one of those patients.

He can almost see his home neighborhood on the southern banks of the river. There, only 100 yards from the United States, narcotics designated for shipment to New York and Houston are selling like never before, causing an epidemic of drug addiction.

He pointed at a 16-year-old who is also addicted to crack.

“He lives just down the street from me. I know his parents,” Martinez said in Spanish.

“A lot of traffickers live in the neighborhood and they bring their shipments there before it crosses the river. Most of it goes across, but when it sits there they sell off parts of it to us. They didn’t before, but for the last five years you can get crack and cocaine, and now everybody’s addicted.”

Over the past five years, Reynosa and other Mexican cities on the U.S. border have experienced rapidly increasing rates of drug addiction, particularly crack addiction, in their poorer neighborhoods, said Alejandra Treviño, director of Centro de Attencíon a la Juventid, a division of Mexico’s ministry of health.

Considering the region’s position as the primary point of entry for drug shipments into the United States, it’s hardly surprising that drugs are readily available. What’s changed recently is traffickers’ willingness to sell in Mexico as opposed to the American cities where their product could command a much higher price.

The explanation in Mexico, supported by Treviño and other government officials, attributes the shift to increased border security by U.S. law enforcement since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Drugs aren’t getting through as easily, causing a virtual bottleneck of cocaine, marijuana and even heroin on the Mexican side of the border.

“Mexico is the place drug flows through and when they don’t pass through they stay on the border,” Treviño said in Spanish.

“You talk to the people in the neighborhoods and you hear this all the time.”

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, while unwilling to comment on drug distribution inside Mexico, did say tighter security had hurt the drug cartels’ ability to traffic across the border.

“It has, but the traffickers are very resourceful, so they adjust their trafficking and smuggling techniques to the resistance they get from U.S. law enforcement,” said Will Glaspy, head of the DEA’s McAllen office.

“Along any trafficking route in the world, eventually you will see addiction problems develop. The more drugs are around; the more people will experiment with them.”

Addiction

Within the walls of the Reynosa branch of CRREAD, a Christian non-profit that provides free drug treatment across Mexico, residents are required to publicly renounce their addiction and catalog the multitude of misdeeds they committed while using three times a day.

The stories, uttered under a tin roof to the encouraging cheers from other residents, all bear a remarkable similarity to one another. A broken home, lots of time on the streets as a teenager, an offer of free drugs from a friend followed by increasing dependency until they ended up here, a dilapidated two-story building filled with more than 50 addicts in various stages of withdrawal set in a middle class south Reynosa neighborhood.

In late October, Jose Pablo Colegio, a 16-year-old high school dropout, arrived at the center.

What had started as a light crack habit three years earlier had progressed to the point Colegio was smoking crack seven days a week. The skinny teenager with the ball cap turned backward paid for the drugs, which only cost him $10 a day, with a construction job his father helped him get.

He’d buy from a dealer living in an apartment near his family’s home and smoke at the construction site, after work with friends, whenever the moment struck him. By October, his family had enough and dragged him off to CRREAD, a decision he did not protest.

“When I’m smoking it’s great, but even then I’m thinking it’s bad for me,” Colegio said.

“When I first got here I didn’t know what was going on, but they talked to me, showed me what I was doing wrong and what I needed to do.”

Unlike most rehab facilities, CRREAD asks its patients to quit without the assistance of prescribed drugs to lessen the affects of withdrawal. Patients arrive and their bodies almost immediately begin craving whatever drug they were using, often leading to vomiting, diarrhea, insomnia and a heightened state of anxiety.

For their first three months patients are required to sleep behind locked gates to keep them from escaping. All they’re given is a regimented schedule of group therapy sessions, chores and optional religious instruction — though almost all of the residents have converted to Christianity since arriving at CRREAD.

“It’s cold turkey, and it’s difficult for them. Most of them won’t sleep for a while,” said Pablo Gaono, the 37-year-old co-founder of the center and a former heroin addict.

“We just have to keep telling them, they can stop doing the drugs. They need to see what’s possible.”

After three months patients have the option to leave the center, but many of them will stay on for months. Like all rehab programs, CRREAD will see a lot of them again in years to come.

Esteban Mata Rosales, a 30-year-old waiter who lives in the small town of Camargo, returned to the center for the second time a few weeks ago after a crack binge.

“The program, it’s great when you’re here because you have everyone around you, helping you,” he said.

“You go home and there’s no one there. First you break down and have a beer. Then it’s a margarita, and you’re like ‘ … why not cocaine?’ It’s everywhere, even in my little town.”

The Crack Crisis

Commander Noe Hinojosa Villarreal keeps a photo album on his office computer at Tamaulipas state police headquarters. All of the photos are from criminal cases under investigation. One, a dead man lying on his back on a Reynosa sidewalk with a bullet hole in his forehead, catches his eye.

“We found crack in his pocket,” Villarreal said. “We’re seeing more and more of this.

“This is what crack is doing to our city.”

Drug-related crime, largely burglaries and car thefts, have increased steadily over the past few years, Villarreal said. Up until 10 years ago Villarreal rarely saw people with drugs other than marijuana, and he attributes this latest trend in petty crime to the growing popularity of crack and other synthetic drugs.

“Before we didn’t consume much of that here and now it’s everywhere,” Villarreal said in Spanish.

“I think a lot of it has to do with social problems. The family structure is on the decline, there’s less work available because of all the people moving here.”

What Villarreal, Treviño and other Mexican officials working on the drug addiction problem want to see is more money and time going toward prevention, namely drug education campaigns. During the U.S. crack epidemic in the 1980s, the U.S. government invested heavily in programs like DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), which have been credited in some circles with helping reduce the rate of drug abuse amongst adolescents.

“Prevention is the key,” Treviño said. “We need all the society to understand that this is a health crisis.”

“It’s not going to be resolved in a year, it’s going to take a long time. But the government is very interested in starting a permanent campaign, not just one day here and there.”

When, if ever, Mexico would actually commit to such a program is questionable.

Traditionally, the Mexican government has offered little real support to drug education programs, said Rodrigo Guzman, a former coordinator with the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, a federal agency that operates in Mexico and the United States.

“It’s a very different system over there. Basically, not enough money is going to prevention,” Guzman said.