Children of Crystal Meth: A Generation Hooked on Methamphetamine (Part I)

From the room where six boys sleep in bunk beds on top of each other, with the door closed from the outside with a pin, emerges sleepy Daniel with thick glasses that hide bushy eyebrows and a diction that, despite methamphetamine consumption, betrays a quick mind. If he weren’t locked up in a rehab center, with a Mohican cut, he could be any neighbor in the neighborhood.

“This is our room, this is where we do our homework and spend part of the day,” he says, showing a desk on which a screen connected to Netflix, a notebook and an altar to Santa Muerte stand out, at the Encuentro Con Mi Realidad rehab center. 

It’s 2:30 in the afternoon and the 24 patients of this center located on a hard-to-reach street in the municipality of Tecámac, State of Mexico, have cleaned house, as they have every day since 7 a.m.; they took group therapy and played sports before moving on to tell their story in front of others, standing behind a huge Alcoholics Anonymous desk, as part of their rehabilitation.

The space is almost full. It’s not exceptional. Like Daniel, most of them come to Victor Quevedo’s clinic of their own free will or are pushed by their family and have a terrifying story. Their names are Aaron, Emmanuel, Erick, Damaris, Leonardo, Elizabeth, Ulises, Addy, Paola or Chiara and they are part of what the Ministry of Health calls “a drug epidemic without precedent”, which in Mexico has the bitter taste of methamphetamine.

Unlike in the United States, where fentanyl makes headlines, in Mexico it’s a silent epidemic, mainly affecting students and the working class. And it’s spreading fast.

“Here it’s not like Europe, where you can lie around at home, high on opioids and receive money from the state. In Mexico you have to work, and methamphetamine helps a lot,” explains Leonardo Luna, director of Fiestestest, a project that manufactures and sells reagents to test drugs and reduce the harm caused by drug use.

In our country, the ‘boom’ of crystal meth, ‘meth’, ‘criko’, ‘speed’ or ‘ice’, as it is also popularly known, occurred in the nineties, when the decision made by drug trafficker Nacho Coronel to flood the country with this powerful and cheap stimulant, and the need of a poor, studious and working generation to acquire a product that would allow them to do everything at the same time, came together.

Methamphetamine was designed for fearless supermen.

Like many young people of his generation, Daniel started out drinking alcohol with his family to let off steam, to laugh, to socialize. Contrary to the stereotype often held about young people who do drugs, he didn’t grow up in a poor family, nor did he suffer violence as a child from which he wanted to escape. Nor is he part of the LGBT+ community that uses ‘meth’ to power their orgies for days on end.

He didn’t know his father, but his mother is a physician specializing in endocrinology and internal medicine who became, paradoxically, chief of service in a toxicological hospital. Although they had difficulty communicating, he had a good childhood. He only liked to party a lot and that led him to try, in front of Vocacional No. 7 where he studied Industrial Maintenance, crystal meth similar to a broken piece of glass that was shoved up his nose by a friend of his from the central supply store who never seemed to need to rest. They had in common the desire to party without having to stop working or studying.

Even though the sharpness of the crushed glass tore his nose, it also immediately lowered the effect of the drink he had been ingesting for days, and for a moment he felt like the king of the world.

“I liked the euphoria, I liked the ‘rush,'” he says, a corner of his mouth forming when he smiles. “At 16, I had already tried everything, hadn’t I, all kinds of substances. But when I met crystal meth, I fell in love. I would snort it to keep drinking day after day, after day, to not get home, to hold off sleep, to go into class and keep going back to drinking, ah, it gave you superpowers!”.

Oble’, as his friends call him, didn’t know it, but that’s exactly why methamphetamine was created in 1919, after World War I: to make soldiers into supermen who didn’t need to eat, sleep or feel fear. In addition to being a stimulant, it’s a sleep and hunger inhibitor, a relative of amphetamines that used to be synthesized from ephedrine and is now mass-produced from precursors such as benzyl cyanide or P2P.

Its use has varied over time, explain researchers Elba Gómez and Ana Navarro in their study “Radiography of an addictive society”: it was used to combat depression, to lose weight, to decongest the nose and caused havoc in China, Japan, Korea and the United States before arriving in Mexico, to change the landscape of drug consumption.

Nacho Coronel decides to move “the poor man’s cocaine” through El Bajio

For a long time, Mexico was a simple transit route for cocaine produced in Colombia, as well as for marijuana and poppy grown and produced in the high mountains of Guerrero and the Golden Triangle, which includes the states of Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Durango, destined for the U.S. market.

But methamphetamine was manufactured “on the other side” from Asian precursors and inputs, until the phenomenon overflowed and the gringo government declared war on it in the nineties. In the midst of the balloon effect that usually occurs when the pressure on the drug trade increases somewhere, meth production moved to Mexican soil, after one man took over following the defunct organization of the Amezcua brothers, the first cartel to traffic ephedrine in Mexico, from Colima.

Ignacio Coronel, who was the third in command of the Sinaloa Cartel and had been in the business since the days of Amado Carrillo, made a decision that changed the course of the country. In addition to sending the Colombian white powder to the United States, he opted to flood Mexico with methamphetamine, known in the neighboring country as “the poor man’s cocaine.

He thus created a new market of addicted consumers capable of multiplying his profits. And he did it from his fiefdoms in the Bajío: Jalisco, Michoacán and Colima, where he received Asian precursors through the ports of Manzanillo and Lázaro Cárdenas, according to Carlos Flórez Pérez, a researcher at the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology. 

The demand for ‘criko’ in the Edomex poverty belt

Just when the never-ending war against drug trafficking began in 2006, Daniel was seven years old and several of the patients of Victor Quevedo, director of the rehabilitation center Encuentro con mi Realidad, in Tecámac, hadn’t even been born.

A rehabilitated alcoholic after 30 years of therapy, Victor looks down at his fingers as he speaks almost in whispers, with a voice that becomes a torrent capable of flooding the house when he raises his tone. “I’ve noticed that kids these days come in more and more messed up,” he says, sitting in a rickety armchair in the small hallway that connects the different rooms and the upper courtyard of his rehab center.

“They’re coming in more high,” he insists, because they’re starting to get high younger and with more and more potent drugs, explains this very small, stocky director. From the age of nine, eleven, you see children addicted to methamphetamine, the main substance that impacts up to 80% of those who come to his space of their own free will, or are locked up by their parents during the containment stage – the hardest stage of detoxification – during which they spend a good part of their days locked up.

“They say that it’s better to contain them because tomorrow they’ll no longer be here, they will either wind up in a hospital or in the cemetery,” adds Victor, who assures that he tries “not to bleed the families” for a sum of around 1,000 pesos a week, plus 300 pesos for food. In theory, a rehabilitation treatment lasts six months, but it can be extended.

And the temptations outside are multiple. Not only in Tecámac, but throughout the State of Mexico, ‘el criko’ is within reach of those seeking new experiences with little money. According to the UN, a gram here costs 13.16 dollars (265 pesos) on average, compared to 28.92 (570 pesos) for cocaine. But the Ministry of Health states that methamphetamine can be obtained for less than 100 pesos in this country where the minimum wage is 8,300 pesos per month.

Drug spots are visible when walking through any disadvantaged neighborhood. There are clandestine sales near the public transport stop, in parks, outside schools, in Facebook groups and on most social networks…. The practice is so common that it seems like it has always been there, but that’s not entirely true.

Information obtained by DOMINGA, thanks to a request for information from the Ministry of National Defense, shows that between 1999 and 2006 the army destroyed only six methamphetamine laboratories in El Bajio and barely half of them in Sinaloa and Baja California.

According to the master’s thesis presented by Daniela Rodriguez at El Colegio de Michoacan, that period coincides with the beginning of the death struggle between the Sinaloa and Gulf Cartels in that region. In the midst of that war, Nacho Coronel formed an alliance with the Milenio Cartel to fight the Zetas and the Knights Templar. This laid the groundwork for what would become the Jalisco New Generation Cartel: one of the largest organized crime groups, responsible for “extreme violence, corruption and extortion,” according to the U.S. government.

Driven by the need for new revenue, Coronel created an extensive network of laboratories — industrial as well as home-based — that earned him the nickname “The King of Crystal Meth.

Between 2007 and 2010, the army destroyed 318 laboratories in El Bajio, mainly in Jalisco and Michoacan, and 68 in Sinaloa, Sonora and Durango, as well as 4 in the State of Mexico, where these spaces needed to supply the growing demand of the capital and its giant working class poverty belt began to appear.

When the army finally took down Nacho Coronel in Jalisco in 2010, it was too late: his heirs in the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, led by the Valencia brothers and Nemesio Oseguera ‘El Mencho’, took over his legacy. With the economic support of the Cuinis gang, the former Zeta Assassins became independent from the Sinaloa Cartel.

Western Mexico became a disputed plaza

In the maps of the National Survey on Drug, Alcohol and Tobacco Consumption of the Ministry of Health, carried out in 2016-2017, it can already be seen how El Bajio and Sinaloa, followed by the State of Mexico and the capital, were transformed into centers of crystal meth consumption, making the west no longer a transit route, but a gigantic consumption plaza where mafias dispute the borders of their territories. 

The impunity linked to drug trafficking and its illegality sheltered other forms of violence. Domestic violence, which tends to worsen when one of the parents is a consumer of a product as strong as ‘criko’; extortion and kidnapping practiced by criminal groups to increase their power; and robberies committed by some addicts to satisfy their need for consumption are just a few examples. Markets have also opened up. On Facebook there are many groups of “crikosos selling cheap stuff” in different states, at prices that defy all competition, for those who are not very demanding in terms of legality.

Methamphetamine turned out to be a perfect product for Mexico, insofar as – unlike coca leaf – it doesn’t require particular climatic and topographical conditions to be planted on large hectares that can be easily eradicated. As shown in the ‘Breaking Bad’ series, it can simply be manufactured in almost any garage, as long as cooks take adequate precautions to protect themselves from the toxic fumes – far less dangerous than fentanyl – and have the precursors that continue to arrive from Asia in mafia-controlled ports.

In El Bajio, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel forged “an economy based on the production of crystal methamphetamine” with regional reach and reconfigured “the map of Mexican consumption, displacing other groups and other substances such as cocaine, marijuana or poppy” with violence, conclude researchers Nancy Chavez, Isaac Vargas, Sara Velasquez and Alejandro Garcia in a scientific article. The money laundering structure and its reinvestment in the local economy, as well as the hiring of small criminal groups affiliated with the organization, facilitated its expansion.

The drug of choice for cab drivers, truckers, laborers and students.

In 2015, when Daniel first tried methamphetamine, it was already readily available in the urban belt where Mexico City’s working class settles.

Much cheaper and with more prolonged effects than cocaine -its effect can last up to 12 hours, depending on the dose-, it became in less than three decades the favorite drug of day laborers, cab drivers, truck drivers, workers, vendors, cooks, single mothers, civil servants, students and an increasingly wide range of young people who need to increase their resistance capacity in a demanding and intense working world, in order to enjoy a little “happiness at low cost”, as Elba Gómez and Ana Navarro define it.

For Daniel, inhaling and then smoking ‘criko’ turned out to be a blessing for a few months. It allowed him to party and stay focused enough in class to dodge his mother’s vigilance. Until the “beneficial” effects were replaced by less pleasant side effects, even though he gave up other drugs to concentrate on the ‘ice’ he smoked in a pipe. “There came a time when I would no longer leave my room, and I only wanted to have dark light, the only thing that would illuminate me was the lighter.”

Months went by like that, “to the point of having hallucinations of insects under my skin. Or of believing that people had something against me, of having hemorrhages, bleeding from my nose, bleeding from my gums, my ears… things got serious. I was screaming for help,” recalls Daniel as he moves to the desk where Victor Quevedo’s pupils tell their stories.

On the scale of harm produced by legal and illegal drugs, according to the National Commission on Mental Health and Addictions, methamphetamine ranks fourth, behind fentanyl, heroin and alcohol, far ahead of marijuana, mushrooms or LSD.

The biggest problem it causes users is that they are consuming themselves. They stop eating and sleeping, lose weight and can quickly suffer psychotic breaks and bouts of paranoia, while their bodies weaken to the point of sores, rotting teeth and other ailments that occur more rapidly than with other drugs.

But none of that has prevented ‘criko’ from being one of the most consumed illegal drugs in Mexico, where 0.9% of the population between 12 and 65 years old had tried it in 2017: about 743 thousand people, according to official figures. And above all, the fastest growing.

The demand for medical care for methamphetamines, ecstasy and stimulants for medical use grew 218% between 2017 and 2021, according to the Mexican Observatory of Mental Health and Addictions, going from being requested in 6 to 21 states, surpassing even the demands for alcohol and marijuana.

In samples taken by chemist Leonardo Luna at festivals and events, it appears that more than a third of the ecstasy and almost half of the cocaine tested has been mixed with methamphetamine, which is more powerful, addictive and cheaper. In Mexico, many crystal meth users don’t even know they are users.

Back at the Encuentro Con Mi Realidad clinic, Aaron, Emmanuel, Erick, Damaris, Leonardo, Elizabeth, Ulises, Addy, Paola, Chiara came to the desk. All students and workers with painful experiences similar to that of ‘Oble’. Even among the psychonaut community, which asks not to demonize drugs, but to redefine the paradigm of the fight against drug trafficking, it’s difficult to find clearly positive experiences with methamphetamine use.

For Daniel, the first violent symptoms linked to methamphetamine use were just the beginning of his stint in hell…

Source: Milenio