New Mexico County Confronts Curse of Addiction

This valley has been described as a place caught between heaven and hell: Its vistas inspire the mind and its soil is said to have healing power, yet it is a place of so much pain.

Makeshift memorials brand the landscape with crosses. Dirty syringes often rest nearby. Death haunts those who have lost loved ones to demon drugs and those who accept that they might be next.

Renee Martinez, 21, wears vacant, bloodshot eyes, a pendant of the Virgin of Guadalupe and an oversized T-shirt that shrouds her track marks. She has been using heroin for three years now, and cocaine for about half that time.

On a sunny morning, the 5-foot-1 addict and a friend scout the parking lot of a methadone clinic in Rio Arriba County, trying to hustle cash for their daily shot of the drug that cuts the craving for heroin.

Martinez explains that she is trying to quit, then acknowledges shooting up two days earlier and using cocaine the night before. “You meet up with your friends, they want you to score for them, then you end up getting high with them.” Getting sober, she says, is “pretty hard here.”

This is Rio Arriba’s hell: For years, the county of 40,000 people in north-central New Mexico has had the highest drug-overdose rate in the nation; 20 people died last year alone. The killer often is heroin or a deadly cocktail of drugs that includes it.

In Chimayo, an old Spanish settlement where 3,000 people live, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration reported 85 deaths between 1995 and 1998 attributed to high-purity, black-tar heroin.

The plight is hardly unique to rural New Mexico.

About 16 million Americans use illegal drugs, according to the latest National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. Use has increased among both teenagers and adults who abuse Ecstasy, marijuana, cocaine, painkillers, tranquilizers, heroin.

Communities are feeling the effects.

In tiny Willimantic, Conn., police scour the streets for heroin traffickers and prostitutes working to fund their habit.

In nearly a dozen towns across Appalachia, methadone clinics treat clients addicted to the painkiller OxyContin.

In Midwestern neighborhoods, police discover more methamphetamine labs every day: 2,725 last year in Missouri alone.

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy wants to reduce nationwide drug use by 25% over the next five years. Deputy Director Mary Ann Solberg acknowledges that it’s an ambitious goal.

“We know we don’t have a prayer unless each community across this country works with us hand-in-hand,” she told about 40 politicians, treatment providers, retirees and recovered addicts at a meeting last month in Rio Arriba County.

Yet her comments were met with some skepticism. Not unlike Martinez, Rio Arriba already has taken the first step. It readily acknowledges that it has a problem. The hard part is getting clean.

*

“Hey, Ness. Happy birthday, baby.” Annette Valerio squats down, scoops up a mound of dirt with a garden shovel and firmly plants the paper plate that reads “Happy Birthday” in a rainbow of colors.

She continues until her daughter’s grave is wreathed in cheerful decor, then sits on a bench and gazes at the photograph of a beaming young girl with hazel eyes and long ebony hair.

Venessa -- “my Nessie,” her mother always says -- would have been 19. She would have graduated from high school, finished her first year of college, perhaps found a boyfriend, began to build a life.

Her mother still imagines all the missed moments even now, a decade after her 9-year-old was shot in the jugular by a heroin-addicted burglar who broke into their home to steal, among other things, the syringes that Venessa used to treat her diabetes.

“Her last words to me were, ‘Mommy, Mommy,’ ” recalled Valerio, who also was shot on that stormy September afternoon in 1993. Her daughter bled to death in her arms, on the rose-colored rug that still carpets their living room.

Yet Valerio feels assured that her daughter did not die in vain. With Venessa’s death and others, Rio Arriba began to recognize that it faced an epidemic.

From the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains outside Santa Fe, Rio Arriba County stretches north along tributaries of the Rio Grande through pastel-colored canyons to the Colorado line.

First settled by the Anasazi Indians and later the Spanish, the region is an intriguing blend of cultures. Pueblos where Indians produce pottery and beadwork intertwine with old Spanish villages in which artisans carve saints of wood and weavers inherit their craft and their looms.

Faith and family are paramount. Each year, thousands of pilgrims walk for miles to the Santuario de Chimayo on Good Friday to scoop handfuls of dirt that many believe can heal. Grandparents accompany their children and grandchildren.

Also handed down from one generation to the next: the curse of addiction.

Most say it began after World War II when soldiers returned home to few jobs and little opportunity. Farming had declined as the government set aside land for parks and forests. Some landowners sold out when Los Alamos National Laboratory was established.

The people turned first to alcohol. Then, after the Korean War, some veterans came back addicted to pharmaceuticals. The Vietnam War introduced a new drug of choice -- heroin -- and increased production just across the border in Mexico meant a steady supply north to Rio Arriba.

By the 1980s, Rio Arriba was “fully blown,” as one recovered addict puts it.

“Heroin was the law around here,” said Chimayo native Phillip Martinez, 43. His old track marks are accentuated by two small scorpion tattoos on his arms.

Despite the growing problem, little was done to fight back. Police resources were limited, and residents were scared. A few who tried to speak out received threatening phone calls. Others were torn between wanting to help and having to turn in a family member to do so.

Then the innocents began getting caught in the cross-fire, like Venessa Valerio and a 10-year-old classmate fatally shot in a drug feud. Burglaries climbed as users broke into homes and businesses.

And the overdose deaths escalated -- from four in 1994 to 13 one year later.

*

In 1995, Chimayo newcomer Bruce Richardson attended his first community meeting about crime. When volunteers were sought to organize another gathering, Richardson stepped up. A few months later, the Chimayo Crime Prevention Organization was born.

Through his committee, Richardson brought together a small but determined cadre of community leaders. With the help of the county health administrator and victims’ advocates, they organized more meetings and marches. Eventually, they grabbed the attention of the state and, finally, Congress.

In March 1999, Sen. Pete V. Domenici (D-N.M.) convened a congressional field hearing in Rio Arriba County. Six months later, armed with maps of drug dealers’ homes plotted by Richardson and his committee, state police and federal agents descended on Chimayo and other villages in the county in a predawn raid that netted 31 heroin traffickers.

Rio Arriba celebrated. At the Chimayo post office, a poster went up: “Thank you to God.”

It was quiet for a while. Petty crime fell. But a new crop of dealers quickly moved in, and some of those who were busted are already back out, said State Police Capt. Quintin McShan, who oversees Rio Arriba County.

“The raids were a good part of it, but did we change the behavior? We made it more subversive, more out of sight,” he said. “Can you still buy heroin in Chimayo? Do we have heroin in our school system? Do we have teenage addicts? The answer is yes.”

Along with the raids came money for treatment and outreach -- more than $10 million in state and federal funds and grants. In December 1999, a nationally recognized treatment foundation opened an outreach and prevention center in Espanola, a few miles from Chimayo.

Yet the center, Amistad de Nuevo Mexico, included no inpatient beds. Amistad sent 52 clients to a residential facility in Arizona and worked with 1,500 through outreach.

But spokesman Karl Moffatt acknowledges that there’s no real way to track success.

“There’s only so many people that just totally turn their lives around. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have a lot of our clients who are dead,” he said. “The majority are in between.”

The county is renovating a 52-bed residential center north of Espanola and hopes to open the doors this fall. Meanwhile, disease prevention specialists are working to teach addicts and their families how to use Narcan, a substance that can reverse the effects of a heroin overdose.

*

Rio Arriba is far from heaven, but it’s not quite the hell it once was. There is hope here.

Annette Valerio senses it when she talks to high school students about her Nessie and sees their tears. Phillip Martinez finds it in the rapt audiences of addicts that he tries to help at group meetings.

You could even catch a glimpse of it in the vacant eyes of Renee Martinez that morning she scouted the methadone clinic parking lot for enough cash to buy her dose. On that day, she got her money and strolled out of the clinic with a grin on her face.

Yet to truly curtail the culture of addiction, the people of Rio Arriba say they must address its underlying causes: the lack of jobs and opportunity, their faltering faith in the future.

Toward that end, they are focusing on the children. Two offshoots of the Chimayo Crime Prevention Organization -- a youth corps and local Boys & Girls Club -- launched programs in the last few years to provide mentoring and activities for kids.

Last month, the day after the Boys & Girls Club dedicated a new building adjacent to Chimayo Elementary, about 30 children jumped rope, shared craft projects and kicked a soccer ball across the school gymnasium. A banner on the wall behind them read: “Real friends don’t let friends take drugs.”

Miguel Quesada, 17, is one of five youth interns helping supervise the children. Of his beloved community, Miguel had this message: Things have changed in Rio Arriba.

“I used to walk home from the bus stop and there’d be needles on the ground. Not anymore.”

“I don’t think there’s one person in this community that addiction hasn’t touched,” added fellow intern Nicholas Martinez, 16. “We’re just trying to grow out of it. And we will.”