Bitter pills

Thousands of Americans buy cheap prescription drugs in Mexico. Some end up in squalid south-of-the-border prisons.

By Janelle Brown

Read more: Insurance, Janelle Brown, Jail, Prisons, Mexico, Medicare, Life

June 1, 2006 | Three years ago, Dawn Marie Wilson found herself in a cement cubby infested with cockroaches and maggots. It was a cell in a prison in Ensenada, Mexico, and it had no toilets, no showers, not even a bed: Wilson slept on the floor. Her biggest luxury was a bucket for washing, and the only way to get basic amenities like plates and forks, blankets or drinking water was to buy or beg for them. "It was disgusting," she recalled, as she quietly sat, almost two years later, in the empty rec room of a federal prison in Dublin, California. "There was prostitution and drugs everywhere -- heroin, crystal meth, marijuana. I'd be sitting at a table with someone shooting up next to me. I kept thinking it would be over at any minute. I thought, This can't last." But it did last. Wilson, a 49-year-old conference planner from San Diego, ultimately spent 21 months in jail in Ensenada, and another two months in a U.S. prison, for something she says she didn't even realize was a crime: buying medicine from a pharmacy in Tijuana without a prescription from a Mexican doctor.

Wilson was one of the thousands of bargain-hunting Americans who pour across the border every day to buy pharmaceutical drugs -- from Valium to Viagra, Oxycontin to Ortho Novum -- at a fraction of the American price. Border pharmacies sold $800 million worth of drugs last year to Americans, according to Marv Shepherd, M.D., director of the Pharmacoeconomic Center at the College of Pharmacy at the University of Texas in Austin; the average age of the buyers was roughly 34 (about 15 percent were senior citizens). "It's clear that there are more people coming across to buy drugs," says Liza Davis, spokeswoman for the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana. "This is the busiest land border crossing in the world, and it's easy. You just walk across and there are pharmacies right there."

Few of these Americans have any idea that what they are doing is often illegal in Mexico; that may explain why in 2004, the number of Americans arrested for the crime nearly doubled, from 25 to 43 (in 2005, thanks in part to better publicity about the law, the number fell back to 26). Davis says the U.S. Consulate is unclear whether this spike in arrests happens because of a police crackdown, or simply as the result of the rising number of Americans crossing the border. But they are worried. Drug buyers who are stopped are in for a rough ride: time in a Mexican jail, hefty bribes to the police, and even, says one woman, a rape by the officer who took her into custody. "What a price to pay for doing something without even thinking!" says Wilson. "I'm a perfect example of the worst that can happen."

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In Tijuana, 30 yards from the U.S.-Mexico border at San Diego, lies the tourist strip of Avenida Revolucion. Here, sandwiched between margarita bars catering to underage college students and the shops selling cheap sombreros, stand hundreds of pharmacies with names like Farmacia E-Z and Drug Depot. On the weekends, Americans of all ages cruise the streets to a blaring soundtrack of Mexican techno, examining hand-written signs that advertise brand-name drugs: Ritalin, Zoloft, Xanax, Meridia. Depending on the pharmacy, the drug and the customer's talent for haggling, the cost can be 50 percent to 75 percent less than it would be in the States.

This zone of Tijuana pharmacies is where Wilson says she stopped two years ago before driving south down the coast to meet her fiancé, whose sailboat was in port in Puerto Escondido. She says she needed a three-month supply of Dilantin and phenobarbital, which she takes to control seizures she's had since childhood. The pharmacist she visited didn't ask to see a prescription, and drugs that would have cost her $210 back in the States cost her $30 instead.

After her errand in Tijuana, Wilson says her car broke down just outside Ensenada. The next morning, when she walked back to the mechanic at 6:30 a.m., she was stopped by the police. They rifled through her bag, found her pills and arrested her. The police confiscated Wilson's credit cards, passport and $400 in cash; another $4,000 was charged to her credit card while she was sitting in jail.

The case quickly devolved into a matter of Wilson's word versus the officers'. Mexican police records state that Wilson had 445 pills, including large quantities of the psychotropic drugs Valium, Xanax and Darvon, and that she readily admitted being a drug addict. Wilson says that's nonsense. She says she had only her anti-seizure medications, a small amount of Valium her doctor had prescribed for anxiety, and a bottle of diabetes medicine she had brought with her from California to deliver to a friend in Mexico. Because American-style bail does not exist in Mexico, Wilson spent the next year and nine months in the crude Ensenada jail waiting for her case to wind through the court system. She had no translator for her trial, and her first attorney, whom she had hired through a friend, failed to even call Wilson's doctor in the United States to confirm her prescriptions. She fired him, but by that point it was too late: She was sentenced to five years in Mexican prison for a crime that, in the United States, would have been punishable by a maximum of six months. When she heard her sentencing, "I was almost afraid to cry," she says. "I was afraid I would reach that low point and not come back."

Next page: "I had no desire to do anything illegal. I wanted to get my medicine and get out"