You might be wondering why an experienced, published journalist would bother with an obscure blog. Here are my reasons:

1. I came up with a blog name, inspired by the X song.

2. I'm working on a book -- my first -- and I'm having a hard time adjusting to the looong writing process and even longer lag time between writing and publishing, especially since I get ideas that I want to write about.

3. It's a repository for stories I've written but, for a variety of reasons having to do with the vagaries and cruelties of freelancing, never published, like this one, which I completed nearly two years ago:

Each spring, thousands of penitents pay their pre-Easter respects at a modest adobe chapel in the forested foothills of northern New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

They arrive at El Santuario de Chimayo with a wish and leave with a promise, in the form of a handful of the sandy dirt scooped from the sanctuary’s sacred pit.

The price for this prized soil, as pilgrims in recent years have learned, is a journey past homes fortressed behind barbed wire and chain link fences, snarling dogs bred to attack, and irrigation ditches choked with beer cans and liquor bottles.

They have also grown accustomed to an addition to the sanctuary’s interior decor.

Once the provenance of crutches and baby booties, offered for miracles sought or granted, its walls now share space with photos hung by the families of local heroin addicts.

The irony is not lost on Chimayo’s residents, many of whom frequent El Santuario and trace their lineage back to the construction of the village’s central plaza in 1740.

“Chimayo is celebrated as this place of incredible spiritual presence,” says Don J. Usner, author of Sabino’s Map, an historical account of life on the plaza. “But it’s equally riven by drugs and violence.”

For the past decade, Chimayo has been the flash point in a county with the nation’s highest rate of death by drug overdose.

Annual death rates can rise and fall, only to rise again, so state epidemiologists hoping to get a better handle on long-term trends group the information in two-year segments.

For the most recent increment, 2003/2004, the rate was 40.8 deaths per hundred thousand people, the highest it’s been since 1999/2000, and more than double the 14.9 state average.

Preliminary results suggest that the 2005 death rate will be about the same. A current national comparison does not exist, but best estimates put the nationwide rate at around 6. In the entire country, only the city of Baltimore compares.

One independent drug treatment agency, whose northern New Mexico service area included Chimayo, left in 2003 after four years, frustrated by “one of the most entrenched, highly toxic drug cultures” it had encountered in more than 30 years in the field.

Theories abound as to the cause of this local scourge. It’s a rite of passage that occasionally gets out of hand.

It’s a genetic weakness resulting from the intermarriage of local families.

Someone gave out free drugs and everybody got hooked.

If the culprit could be found, the thinking goes, the ever-elusive solution might finally become clear.

But among those who know Chimayo best – its longtime families – there is the sense that the answer is as complicated as the history of the village itself.

Irvin Trujillo, a 51-year-old sixth–generation Chimayoso, was the first person in his family to attend college, earning a degree in civil engineering from the University of New Mexico.

More than 20 years ago he and his wife Lisa opened Centinela Traditional Arts, a weaving studio where they combine time-worn methods with a pop-art aesthetic.

One of Trujillo’s rugs, called “The Spider from Mars”, is housed in the Smithsonian’s permanent collection. “We came back here because we knew we could tap into this rich resource,” Trujillo says. “So many people learned to weave like I did, from their fathers, who learned from their fathers before them. You can trace everything that goes on here back for generations.”

As Centinela flourished, so did the village drug trade. By the 1990’s Chimayo was an established destination and distribution point on the pipeline that smuggles black tar heroin from Mexico.

Addicts began appearing at Centinela’s door.

“I felt sorry for them, I felt shame for them,” says Irvin Trujillo, who describes himself as a recovering alcoholic. “I wanted to help make things better.”

The Trujillos lent out looms and took on apprentices, often with disastrous results. One addiction-addled employee came to work oblivious to what she had been taught the day before.

A neighbor began selling drugs a few doors down from the Trujillo’s shop. Then a relative sneaked into Trujillo’s elderly mother’s living room seeking refuge from a deadly drug dispute.

Not long after, on an afternoon when Irvin Trujillo happened to be standing outside his sister’s house just across the road from his shop, he saw a truck pull into the driveway and heard a loud bang. A drug-dealing cousin had just been shot.

“One thing is for sure,” says Lisa Trujillo. “I’ve been to more funerals than weddings.”

Virtually every Chimayo family has similar stories to tell.

In this village of 2,900 inhabitants, the dealers and the shopkeepers, the elders and the addicts are bound together by blood or habit.

In 1996, a 14-year-old boy died at a drug house of a heroin overdose.

In the space of three days in the fall of 1998, two local men died of gunshot wounds to the head.

A year later a dealer from the village set to testify in a drug case was murdered by a Chimayo man who later said he’d been promised $1,000 in drugs from yet another local dealer for slitting the man’s throat, cutting an ear off and crushing his head with a barbell.

“It was like the old West, where the cowboys and the outlaws were fighting it out in the town,” Irvin Trujillo says. “Here they all knew each other.”

* * *

In the early 19th century, Chimayo families bartered chilies and apples for clothing and other necessities and sold hand-woven goods to eager tourists.

But after New Mexico was annexed to the United States in 1846 many farmers lost their livelihoods, either to unscrupulous land speculators or to the government, which did not recognize their stakes in communal property.

Drought, the Great Depression and the construction of a highway that bypassed the heart of the town all contributed to Chimayo’s gradual decline.

With it came increased tolerance for mind-altering excess.

During his childhood, Irvin Trujillo recalls, men from the village would congregate in his family’s windmill for days-long binges. When villagers were killed in drunk driving accidents, “everybody just accepted it,” he says. “That was how it was.”

Lacking in local jobs, Chimayo became a bedroom community for the affluent neighboring towns of Los Alamos and Santa Fe.

Eventually the highway that took away the tourists and the workers brought in the drug dealers, who recognized the utility of a base that is both remote and relatively easy to access.

They also found customers. Only half of Chimayo’s employment-age residents have jobs or are seeking work, and 20 percent of its households subsist below the poverty line.

“You’re emptying the area of healthy adults,” says Lauren Reichelt, director of the Rio Arriba County Health Department “That’s how you are spreading this epidemic.”

The priority, for now, is bringing overdoses under control. Last fall, the state opened an inpatient rehab center about a half-hour’s drive from Chimayo.

Staffed with nurses trained in addiction treatment, it is the first center of its kind in Northern New Mexico.

The center has only 17 beds for detox, and the wait for a spot is two months. On a brisk January morning, one of its clients, a 42-year-old grandmother, described the ordeal of trying to kick the habit --for the sixth time.

Until recently she worked at Chimayo’s lone restaurant, and many of her customers were visitors to El Santuario. For her, heroin brought its own kind of miracle, relief from the punishing stresses of her life.

But the respite was short lived while the problems only seemed to grow worse. “Every time you go back to using it’s so much harder to stop,” she said, tears pooling in her eyes. “It’s so much harder to climb out of that hole.”

In the spring of 1999, the Trujillos joined an anti-drug march along a two-lane highway frequented by dealers and addicts.

Within months federal drug agents descended en masse, making 34 arrests and shutting down four of the area’s biggest drug dealing families.

Former drug dens were seized for community use, the governor granted $1.5 million in aid, and in 2001 New Mexico became the first state to legalize the distribution of Narcan, which can halt a potentially fatal overdose.

“Now it’s not cool to be a dealer,” says Chellis Glendenning, a Chimayo resident and author of Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade. “It’s not cool to be a user. It changed the whole feel of what it is like to be here.”

But even as heroin loses some of its cache, other worrying trends are emerging.

From 2002 to 2004, cocaine or alcohol were found to be contributing factors in 91% of the area’s heroin overdose deaths.

Preliminary data for 2004-2005 for two northern New Mexico emergency rooms that serve the Chimayo area show an overdose death rate among multiple drug users more than double the rate for those admitted for heroin use alone.

“Even if black tar heroin vanished tomorrow, the addiction problem would not magically disappear,” Reichelt says. “This is much, much deeper than the abuse of one drug.”

According to police, nearly all of the dealers arrested in the 1999 raid are back on the street, and some have resumed dealing.

“If someone gets out of jail or comes out of a treatment program and there isn’t a job waiting for them, they’re going to fall back into the same circle of influences that got them in trouble in the first place,” says Rich Newman, deputy chief of the New Mexico State Police. “We’re not going to arrest our way out of this problem.”

At Centinela Traditional Arts, the Trujillos have become more cautious about who they hire.

When locals come into the shop looking for work, Irvin Trujillo sometimes tells them stories about being in college, about jobs and opportunities outside of Chimayo.

“I am not one to say how a person should live his life,” he says. “I only want them to see that there is more to life than this.”