Mexico is finding that dealing with the devil is not a deal without consequences. And those consequences are coming home to roost in a most horrific way.

Not long ago, the Mexican government maintained an “understanding” with the drug traffickers: Don’t cause problems in Mexico, and roll your drugs into the United States without too many hassles. Oh, and don’t forget the payoffs.

But then, in 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary Party lost the presidential election, and with it, lost its absolute hold on power for the first time since 1929. From the president’s office down to the governors and mayors and police chiefs, the patronage and the drug deals starting falling apart as new political players and officials came on the scene and wanted their own arrangements or, in the extreme, wanted to make no arrangements with criminals at all.

President Calderón seemed to belong in the latter category, and with a vengeance. In December 2006, he struck at the four main cartels, dispatching 20,000 soldiers to patrol cities along the border. He targeted the bosses, killing those who resisted and extraditing others to the U.S. At the same time, the U.S. was tightening its control at the border, making it just a little more difficult for the traffickers.

While all that was well and good, the downside of this assault was that it opened the doors for lower-level cartel types to start their own side businesses. And these entrepreneurial traffickers did what any smart entrepreneurs would do – they looked for new markets. And the closest, easiest new market was the one right in their own backyard: Mexico.

So one cartel gets broken into 50 mini-cartels, a hydra-headed monster.

The rise in drug peddling is partly due to political changes in Mexico, said Carlos Antonio Flores Pérez, an expert on crime at Mexico's Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology.

At the same time, theUnited States has been building walls and adding federal agents to the border, making it harder to get drug shipments through.

From the Arizona Republic: From 2000 to 2006, the number of new patients at Mexican drug-treatment centers more than quadrupled, to 57,173, the Mexican Health Department says. It plans to open 310 new rehab centers this year, triple the current total, to handle the demand.

"We used to think of drug traffickers as people who took drugs through Mexico to the United States," Mexican President Felipe Calderón said in a speech to addiction counselors last month.

"But their goal is no longer to just get drugs to the United States but rather to get iton the domestic market, generating consumers here in Mexico who will buy it andbuy it for the rest of their lives."

In Agua Prieta, across the border from Arizona's Douglas, the drug peddlers sell crack, methamphetamine, heroin,cocaine and marijuana from cars that cruise through the dirt streets. The addicts call them "ice-cream trucks."

The problem is not just along the border, addiction experts say. In the Mexico City area, cocaine and crack are beginning to displace marijuana and inhalants.

"Before, cocaine was expensive here. Now, you can get it for practically nothing,"said Irving Aguilar, medical director at the Clinicas Claider treatment center.

A gram of cocaine now sells in central Mexico for 200 pesos, or about $19, he said. Crack is $9.50 a rock and getting cheaper.

At Clinicas Claider, crack addicts began outnumbering alcoholics in 2003, he said. They now account for 60 percent of his patients.

And that’s just the beginning, for experts are most troubled by the arrival of crystal meth in Mexico. From the paper again:

"Look at this," said Ricardo Sánchez, research director for the federal health department's rehab centers, as he pointed to a map of Mexico on his computer.

Bright dots showed areas with meth addicts.

In 2000, the only dots were in Tijuana and Mexicali on the California border. But as Sánchez tapped a key to scroll forward through time, the dots multiplied until they formed a line from the central state of Michoacán to the Arizona border.

"This is not a coincidence," Sánchez said. "The cartels are taking over the Americanmeth supply, and they are getting Mexicans addicted, too."

Clandestine laboratories in Michoacán create methamphetamine from pseudoephedrine shipped from Asia or distilled from stolen medicine.

Crackdowns on illegal immigrants in the United States may also be bringing different kinds of addiction to Mexico, some experts say.

For decades, heroin was produced in Mexico only for export because of its high price, Sánchez said.

But in 2001, the health department started to see heroin addicts in the central state of Puebla.Many of them were migrants deported from New York, he said.

A recent health department study in border cities showed that 23 percent of Mexican youths who had lived in the United States had tried drugs, compared with 5 percent who hadnever left Mexico.

To combat theproblem, the Mexican government boosted funding for addiction treatment programs from $14.3 million to $76.2 million this year, mostly for new rehabcenters.

Rehab is an importantpart of the battle but it is far from winning the war. Just as the U.S. dugitself into a hole with both drugs and illegal immigration, Mexico has done the same thing with the drug cartels. And just like the damage done to the U.S.with drugs and illegal immigration, now Mexico must face the music and strikeback. And it is far from certain that the good guys, or at least the government, in Mexico, will prevail over the murderers and dealers and corrupt lawyers and all the others.

And God help us ifthey don’t prevail.