IN MEXICO, AMBIVALENCE ON A DRUG LAW

TIJUANA, Mexico -- Yolanda Espinosa's eyes darted this way and that.
Her hands trembled. For Ms. Espinosa, a cocaine and heroin addict in
desperate need of a fix, a new Mexican law decriminalizing the
possession of small quantities of drugs had a definite appeal.

"That's good," she said in her mile-a-minute speaking style. "Real good."

But as someone fed up with her life in Tijuana's red light district,
where she and hundreds of other addicts live in flophouses and
traipse through the streets in search of their next dose, Ms.
Espinosa also had her doubts about what Mexico's politicians had done.

"No one should live like I live," she said. "It's an awful life. You
do anything to satisfy your urge. You sell your body. It ruins you. I
hope this won't make more people live like this."

Ms. Espinosa's ambivalence reflects her country's. Under siege by
drug traffickers, Mexico took a bold and controversial step last week
when it opted to no longer prosecute those carrying relatively small
quantities of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs. Instead,
people found with drugs for "personal and immediate use," according
to the law, will be referred to free treatment programs where they
will be considered patients, not criminals.

The decriminalization effort, which many lawmakers endorsed with
little enthusiasm, is intended to free up prison space for dangerous
criminals and to better wean addicts away from drugs. It is not the
only legislation put forward that would probably never have been
considered were the country not in the midst of a bloody and
seemingly endless drug war.

Capital punishment, which has not been carried out in Mexico for
nearly 50 years, is now being offered by some lawmakers as an answer
to the nation's ills. In April, Congress debated whether to make
marijuana legal altogether, a measure President Felipe Calderon
fiercely opposes.

Under the new law, a police search that turns up a half-gram of
cocaine, the equivalent of about four lines, will not bring any jail
time. The same applies for 5 grams of marijuana (about four
cigarettes), 50 milligrams of heroin, 40 milligrams of
methamphetamine or 0.015 milligrams of LSD.

"I could have all that and they wouldn't touch me?" Ms. Espinosa
asked with surprise. She was hardly the only one who missed the
government's announcement, which was intentionally low-key. Fearful
that the law would be misconstrued, the government enacted it with
little fanfare on Thursday.

"This is not legalization," Bernardo Espino del Castillo of the
attorney general's office told The Associated Press. "This is
regulating the issue."

The battle against the drug cartels, which has resulted in more than
11,000 deaths since Mr. Calderon took office in December 2006, will
continue unabated, officials insist. Revising drug possession laws,
in fact, will help focus the drug war more effectively, they say.

Besides taking the focus of law enforcement officials off small-time
users, the law allows the state police to arrest those with up to
1,000 times the personal consumption amounts, people who would be
considered dealers. Anyone with larger amounts would be seen as
trafficking drugs, and would be handed over to federal authorities.

"With this reform we will make the combined capability of enforcement
against this crime a legal and operational reality," Attorney General
Eduardo Medina-Mora told a conference of state prosecutors last week.

Mexico's approach won praise from organizations that consider the
jailing of users a waste of resources that does not reduce drug
consumption. In the United States, some states have decriminalized
the possession of small amounts of marijuana but not other drugs.

"The decision by the Mexican government to decriminalize the
consumption of small amounts of drugs constitutes a step in the right
direction after decades of failed policy," said Juan Carlos Hidalgo,
the Cato Institute's project coordinator for Latin America. "It is in
line with efforts by other Latin American leaders and governments who
are increasingly skeptical of Washington's prohibitionist drug policies."

Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said
the approach in Mexico "contrasts sharply with the United States,
where arrests for marijuana possession hit a record high last year --
roughly 800,000 annually -- and now represent nearly half of all drug
arrests nationwide."

Even before the new law went into effect, Mexicans caught with small
amounts of drugs were not routinely prosecuted, officials said. But
the change takes the discretion of whether to throw drug users in
jail away from police officers, who frequently shook down people by
threatening them with arrest.

As Ms. Espinosa spoke, a police car went by and she hopped up from
the curb. "Let's move," she said.

Under the law, people caught with drugs for the third time would be
forced to go to treatment. Mr. Calderon had proposed a tougher
version that would have jailed people who repeatedly failed to follow
through with treatment. The version that Congress passed specified no
penalties for noncompliance.

A similar law passed in 2006, but the president at the time, Vicente
Fox, rejected it under pressure from the United States. Now, Mr. Fox
is speaking of the need to consider legalizing marijuana, and the
United States government has remained largely silent on the change.

At one Tijuana drug treatment center, a former addict was not
convinced that going easy on those found with drugs was the right
approach. "With everything that's happening, we need to distance
ourselves from drugs," said the former addict, Luis Manuel Delgado,
50, who is also the center's assistant director. "Imagine if I told
the people in here that it was now legal for them to have a little. No way."

Jailing addicts helps them reach rock bottom and decide to turn their
lives around, Mr. Delgado said. Others, however, contend that prison
time in Mexico only exposes users to even more dangerous prisoners,
who can then recruit them into the drug business. And drug use is
rampant behind bars in Mexico, making it no real refuge from the streets.

Besides an upsurge in drug-related violence tied to traffickers
supplying the lucrative United States market, Mexico also finds
itself grappling with many more domestic users. One government survey
put the number of addicts at 460,000, over 50 percent more than in 2002.

Like Ms. Espinosa, a 50-year-old mother who has not seen her children
in years, many addicts live dismal lives. In border cities like
Tijuana, poverty, proximity to the United States and an ample supply
of drugs make the addiction rates among the highest in all of Mexico.
A recent study showed that as many as 67 percent of the more than
1,000 intravenous drug users tested in Tijuana were positive for
tuberculosis. Other researchers have put HIV rates in Tijuana at more
than triple the national average.

Ms. Espinosa, deported nine years ago from the United States, where
her family remains, wants to leave her life of high highs and low
lows behind. "I've gotten clean before," she said. "I lasted three
years. Then I relapsed."

As her eyes scanned the street scene, she continued: "It's hard. But
I'm going back. Really. I'm going to go back."