Community | February 06, 2010 | 28 comments

Mexico drug cartels go into the rehab business

source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35241198/ns/world_news-americas/

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Mexico's powerful drug cartels have been operating drug rehabilitation clinics, turning some into bloody killing fields and forcing recovering addicts into their ranks of hit men and smugglers.

At least two of the country's six major drug cartels have used treatment facilities to further their trade, top Mexican law enforcement officials told The Associated Press in exclusive interviews. One group even opened its own centers where they brainwashed addicts during rehabilitation, offering them an ultimatum once they kicked their habits: work for us or we'll kill you.

Here, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, 41 people have been killed in massacres at rehab clinics over the past year and a half — massacres prompted not only by recruitment efforts within the clinics, but also by more common reasons like failure to pay for drugs or betrayal of a dealer.

'Extension of the battlefield'
"The rehabilitation centers are an extension of the battlefield," said Edgardo Buscaglia, a leading Mexican drug expert. "There are no refuges anymore."

The phenomenon highlights the government's failure to address the social ills that have grown from Mexico's burgeoning drug trade, he said. While the government has gone after the cartels using the police and military, they have done little to regulate private treatment facilities that have proliferated as cocaine use doubled nationwide over the last six years.

In Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million with an estimated 100,000 addicts, many of the clinics are unlicensed, run out of dilapidated homes by former addicts — making them easy targets for traffickers to infiltrate.

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