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In Mexico, the problem of drug trafficking is well publicized, but you can't say the same when it comes to the problem of drug addiction.

While nowhere near the levels seen in the U.S., Mexico is battling a growing problem — in the past decade illicit drug use has grown by more than a third.

Tijuana's Drug Boom Reflects Mexico's New Problem

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While millions admit to using marijuana, cocaine and meth, addiction is not talked about openly, especially among the country's rich or famous, but one former champion boxer has set out to change the image of recovering addicts and rehabilitation.

Rise Out Of Poverty

In the 1980s and '90s, Julio Cesar Chavez was known for his strong chin, feared for his left hook and widely called one of the greatest "pound-for-pound" fighters of his era — and one of the greatest Mexican boxers of all time.

His rise to fame is truly a rags-to-riches story. He was one of 11 children, and his family was so poor for a time that they lived in an abandoned train caboose. His mother washed and ironed clothes for a living. Chavez says that he started fighting when he was 8 years old, and that he always dreamed of making enough money to buy her a home.

With six world titles in three weight divisions and more than 80 career knockouts, Chavez bought her the house and much more.

"I had it all — money, women, fame, cars, yachts, everything a man could want — but it didn't give my life meaning," says Chavez. "I felt nothing. So what did I do? The most stupidest thing I could."

He found refuge in drugs and alcohol.

'That's When The Failures Began, The Defeats'

In the living room of his home in Tijuana, Mexico, sitting in an overstuffed leather reclining chair, Chavez is surrounded by prizefighting photos and championship belts.

One of the framed pictures depicts what Chavez says was his most famous fight. It's a shot of him and Meldrick Taylor in the ring in 1990 in Las Vegas. Chavez had been trailing most of the fight, but with seconds left on the clock in the final round he landed a solid right and sent Taylor tumbling. The ref stopped the fight, giving Chavez the win.

Despite the dramatic victory, Chavez says that drinking and drugs soon began to get the best of him.

"At first I [could] control it, but I just needed more alcohol and more cocaine and more and more," he says. "That when the problems really started. That's when the failures began, the defeats."

Four years later, against Frankie Randall in Las Vegas, Chavez took a solid blow in the 11th round, getting knocked to the ground for the first time in his career.

Chavez would go on to lose five more fights before retiring in 2005. He says he spent many more years after that addicted. His marriage ended, some of his friendships were ruined and his health suffered.

Then four years ago, while at a doctor's office and anesthetized for a procedure for his ulcers, his son called an ambulance and took him, unconscious, to rehab.

"I woke up in the clinic in a room with the IV still in my arm, and I just ripped it out and started cussing at everyone," says Chavez.

But he stayed for nearly 6 months — and has been clean since.

An Anti-Addiction Ambassador

At 5-foot-7 and looking fit and trim, Chavez says addiction is not talked about openly in Mexico, and that the public is not forgiving of its fallen stars, and they suffer alone for fear of criticism. But that hasn't stopped him from telling his story, or from helping out addicts.

At Clinica Bajo del Sol in Tijuana, a rehab center Chavez opened, some 40 men and women, say a prayer before dinner. The spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean contrasts with the coils of barbed wire topping the entire facility's high brick walls.

Clinic psychologist Guillermo Rangel Mendoza says that Chavez frequently shares his story with the patients, which helps, but that the types of drugs taking off in Mexico in recent years — including meth, heroin and Ecstacy — weren't problems back in Chavez's days.

The surge in designer drug use here frightens Chavez. He recently opened another a clinic in Sinaloa, and says he wants to open at least two more as soon as possible.

Julio Cesar Chavez of Mexico stands in his corner after receiving a head butt from Frankie Randall in the eighth round of their 1994 WBC Super Lightweight Championship fight. The scheduled 12 round fight was stopped after the incident, and the judges awarded the fight to Chavez. John Gurzinski/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption John Gurzinski/AFP/Getty Images

He seems to be changing Mexico's perception of recovered addicts. Earlier this year, a 20-foot bronze statue of Chavez went up in the main square in his boyhood home of Culiacan, the capital of Sinoloa. He's now a regular analyst on ESPN en Espanol and on TV Azteca in Mexico. And President Enrique Pena Nieto dubbed him an anti-addiction ambassador at a recent conference on combating Mexico's growing drug problem.

"I felt excited, happy and proud," says Chavez about the recent accolades. "At the same time I feel the pressure, the commitment. I really have to stay clean now."

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Mexico

Prison is perhaps the last place anyone would expect to learn about investing and money management.

But at San Quentin Prison, Curtis Carroll's class is a hot item. The 36-year-old has gained a reputation for his stock-picking prowess. He's even earned the nickname "Wall Street."

"You know, growing up in the neighborhood everything was always associated with white prosperity, black not."

- Curtis Carroll

Carroll and prison officials have teamed up to create a financial education class for inmates. He starts off the class with a motivational speech.

"Financial education for me has been a lifesaver," he says. "And I have always been passionate about trying to make money. The problem with that money is it was focused in the wrong area — crime."

Carroll is serving up to life in prison for a murder he committed when he was 15. When he first entered, he was illiterate. Then one day Carroll grabbed what he thought was the sports page of a newspaper so his cellmate could read it to him. What he actually picked up was the business section. An older inmate asked Carroll if he knew anything about markets.

"I was like, 'The markets what?' " he says. "And he was like, 'Man, that's the stocks.' And I was really like, 'Man, nah.' "

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The inmate then told Carroll that's where white people keep their money.

"I was like, 'Whoa, white folks?' I mean anywhere white people make their money I want to be there," he says. "You know, growing up in the neighborhood everything was always associated with white prosperity, black not."

Carroll scraped together hundreds of dollars by cashing in unused postage stamps he acquired selling tobacco to prisoners. His first investment was in high-risk penny stocks, making just enough money to keep investing. The whole process motivated him to learn to read. Now, Carroll makes thousands of investments. He maintains notebooks filled with the daily stock price fluctuations of hundreds of companies.

Zak Williams, a graduate of Columbia Business School, says Carroll knows what he's talking about. He's one of several volunteers who assist Carroll with teaching the financial education class. But Williams also says Carroll's strategies are heavily based on short-term, high-risk investments. Instead, William emphasizes the long term.

"We need to take an approach that's enabling for an inmate to not have to take out a loan or a credit card line that might be considered predatory, high interest," Williams says. "We want to prevent that practice in favor of saving and responsibly investing."

San Quentin prison spokesman Sam Robinson says Carroll has learned a valuable life skill.

"Most of the skills that address rehabilitation inside of prisons have to do with vocational trades, anger management and victims-awareness type of education," he says.

The class also touches on the personal component. Prisoners are counseled about their emotional connection to money and the possible pitfalls. Rick Grimes, who is also serving a life sentence, says the lessons are valuable, teaching him to manage his money in prison and also invest money to give to his son.

"I can benefit by helping my family," Grimes says. "It still feels good to give back to my community even though I can't get out right now."

Many of the prisoners in this class will one day get out. And that feeling of being part of a community, and knowing how to manage their finances, could help make their re-entry more successful.

prisoners

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Wall Street

Sorry bacon lovers, we've got some sad news about your favorite meat.

To get those sizzling strips of pork on your plate each morning takes more antibiotics than it does to make a steak burrito or a chicken sausage sandwich.

i

The love of meat is exploding in Asia, and with it, comes antibiotic consumption by chickens, top, and pigs, bottom. Green represents low levels of drug used; yellow and orange are medium levels; and, red and magenta are high levels. PNAS hide caption

itoggle caption PNAS

The love of meat is exploding in Asia, and with it, comes antibiotic consumption by chickens, top, and pigs, bottom. Green represents low levels of drug used; yellow and orange are medium levels; and, red and magenta are high levels.

PNAS

Pig farmers around the world, on average, use three times as much antibiotics as cattle ranchers do, per pound of meat. Poultry farmers fall somewhere between the two.

That's one of the conclusions of a study published Thursday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It's the first look at the amount of antibiotics used on farms around the world — and how fast consumption is growing.

The numbers reported are eye-opening.

In 2010, the world used about 63,000 tons of antibiotics each year to raise cows, chickens and pigs, the study estimated. That's roughly twice as much as the antibiotics prescribed by doctors globally to fight infections in people.

"We have huge amounts of antibiotic use in the animal sector around the world, and it's set to take off in a major way in the next two decades," says the study's senior author, Ramanan Laxminarayan, who directs the Center for Disease Dynamics Economics & Policy in Washington, D.C.

With half of the world's pigs living in China, the country tops the list as the biggest antibiotic consumer in farming.

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The European Union banned the use of antibiotics to boost animals' growth in 2006. At first, the ban had little effect on the amount of drugs given to pigs. Carsten Rehder/Corbis hide caption

itoggle caption Carsten Rehder/Corbis

The European Union banned the use of antibiotics to boost animals' growth in 2006. At first, the ban had little effect on the amount of drugs given to pigs.

Carsten Rehder/Corbis

But the U.S. isn't far behind in second place. We use about 10 percent of the world's total. Brazil, India and Germany round out the top five for consumption of farm animal consumption of antibiotics.

What frightens Laxminarayan is the huge rise in farm drug use, especially in middle-income countries. "We project in the next 20 years, world consumption antibiotics in animals will double," he says. "The implications for the effectiveness of our antibiotics could be quite devastating."

As people around the world get richer, they want to eat more meat. Who can blame them, right? But all those extra chicken wings and pork chops come primarily from factory farms.

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"These [farms] are hard to implement without drugs because a lot animals are kept very close to each other on these farms," Laxminararyan says. "The antibiotics prevent infections and encourage the animals to grow." (Scientists still aren't sure how the drugs boost animals' growth.)

At the same, drugs on farms is essentially a free-for-all.

"In most countries around the world, there's virtual no regulation for antibiotic use on the animal side, including the U.S.," Laxminararyan says. One exception is the European Union, which banned drugs to boost animal growth. Farmers there can still give animals antibiotics to prevent infections.

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Here in the U.S., there are "voluntary guidelines" for farmers but no enforced regulations. "You can actually go to the Eastern Shore in Washington and buy antibiotics in sacks, or in pounds, for your chickens" he says. "They're literally the same antibiotics you get at a pharmacy with a prescription but at a far lesser cost."

Most of the drugs in animals are used at very low concentrations, mixed with food and water. "It serves as a substitution for good hygiene and herd health on factory farms," Laxminararyan says. "But we've found that when animals have good nutrition, good genetics and there is good hygiene on the farm, the added value of antibiotics is quite minimal."

The more antibiotics used in agriculture worldwide, the more drug-resistant bacteria emerge on farms — and sewage systems and water supplies.

Pharmaceutical companies and agricultural groups say there's no evidence that these drug-resistant bacteria are a threat to people's health. And Laxminararyan agrees there's little direct evidence that antibiotics in animals hurts people.

"But the circumstantial evidence, linking use in animals to drug-resistant bacteria in humans, is exceedingly strong," he says.

Just a few years ago, scientists in Arizona showed that a methicillin-resistant strain of Staphylococcus aureus in pigs started infecting farmers. The "pig MRSA" accounts for only a small proportion of human infections worldwide. But scientists think it has the potential to spread.

antibiotics in animals

antibiotic resistance

agriculture

Global Health

There's a researcher at the RAND Corporation who has been building a reputation as a curmudgeonly skeptic when it comes to trendy ways to fight America's obesity epidemic.

First, Roland Sturm took aim at the idea that "food deserts" — areas without well-stocked grocery stores — cause unhealthy diets and obesity. His studies found that they do not. When Los Angeles decided in 2008 to ban new fast-food restaurants in some of the city's poorest neighborhood, Sturm was skeptical that it would help lower obesity rates.

Now Sturm, an economist, has taken a close look at what LA's fast-food ban has accomplished. He concludes in new paper published online by the journal Social Science & Medicine that there's no evidence it had any effect at all. In fact, obesity rates in South Los Angeles and other neighborhoods the law was aimed at increased faster than in other parts of the city or other parts of the county.

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Advocates of the measure saw it as a powerful tool to help improve diets. Opponents, like fast-food chains, said "the sky is falling," Sturm tells The Salt. In reality, he says, "this has had no measurable impact."

In part, he says, it's because the fast-food ban took aim at an inconsequential target. It merely blocked new construction or expansion of "stand-alone fast-food" restaurants. Yet Sturm found that in South LA, the area covered by the ban, free-standing restaurants are relatively uncommon. They are far outnumbered by restaurants in strip malls and small food shops such as corner stores, none of which are restricted by the new city ordinance.

In the years since the ordinance was enacted, he says, the distribution of food outlets in this part of LA has remained more or less the same. Small corner stores are common, and so are fast-food restaurants in strip malls. No new free-standing fast-food restaurants have opened, but they were rare to start with.

Finally, he says, "social norms have not changed, either." Surveys of diet and obesity show no changes that can be attributed to the new fast-food restrictions. Fast-food consumption and obesity rates continued to increase in all areas of LA from 2007 to 2011-2012, and the increase was greatest in the areas affected by the fast-food restrictions. There was one notable exception: Soda consumption declined, but this was true across the city, not just in South LA.

Barry Popkin, a professor of global nutrition at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, says he wasn't surprised at all by Sturm's observations. "That little ban was just too trivial," he tells The Salt. Many studies have now concluded that physical access to food "is less important than people think."

"Trivial" not how Kelly Brownell, a professor of public policy, psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, characterizes it, though. "I would not agree that this was a trivial measure, as it could be precedent setting, and in communities without many fast food restaurants, setting limits could help prevent problems," Brownell writes in an email. But he says he also wasn't surprised that the ban wasn't effective.

Sturm says he never set out to be an obesity policy killjoy. "I have no horse in that race, I care about getting facts right," he says. He admits, though, that the notion of supermarket proximity reducing obesity "always seemed fishy" even before he looked at the data.

And sometimes, he says, altering aspects of food environment can affect diets and obesity. He's come to the conclusion, for instance, that food prices matter. He's analyzed data from the U.S. and from South Africa, and in both cases, when fruits and vegetables were cheaper, people ate more of them, compared to less-healthy foods.

Popkin agrees. Diets won't change significantly, he says, "until we start changing the relative price of food," making nutritious food more affordable.

fast food

obesity

Los Angeles

Fitness & Nutrition