MERCED -- Authorities here are taking a new approach to halting the spread of methamphetamine in rural areas, speaking in a familiar language to the Hispanic laborers who are often recruited to manufacture the drug.

Their just-say-no tools? A docudrama in Spanish that features flashy kingpins and a pumping nortena soundtrack, and an accompanying fotonovela -- a graphic novel format popular in Mexico. Police from Tennessee to Colorado have requested copies of the film and picture storybooks in hopes of holding their own screenings in Latino neighborhoods.

While meth is produced nationwide, California's Central Valley remains a primary distribution point for the drug, according to a U.S. Department of Justice report released last month. Increasingly, big Mexican drug cartels are gaining ground over smaller regional meth rings, and setting up one of their labs can be an attractive and lucrative alternative to backbreaking work in the fields.

"I've known people related to family members who thought cooking meth was an opportunity to get ahead and get a piece of the American dream," said Virginia Madueno, a public relations executive in Riverbank, a small city about 95 miles east of San Francisco. "I've seen what it has done.

"We were trying to get that message across to a population that has a very low literacy level and that's really isolated," she said. "So we thought, 'Aha! a fotonovela."'

Like installations of a Dickens novel, fotonovelas are serials that often feature the same characters -- truckers with a heart of gold, or secretaries trying to get ahead -- who experience life's dramas in a pocket-sized, picture format.

In the bilingual, full-color booklet Madueno conceived, readers experience the dangers of the drug trade through one fictional family.

The plot is relatively simple: Jose, a farmworker, lose his job and is recruited by a drug lord to cook meth at his house. He hides the backyard lab from his pregnant wife, Maria, and his young daughter, Raquel, who dies of chemical exposure at the film's tragic conclusion.

The first run of 15,000 copies of "No Vale La Pena," or Spanish for "it's not worth it," was soon exhausted, said Ben Duran, a leader in Merced's Latino community. More were printed, and it's now available at Hispanic supermarkets across California.

"Then we thought, 'What if we make the book come alive?"' said Duran, who used time off from his job as president of a community college to play the part of the drug kingpin.

Last year, Duran petitioned a California congressman for funds, contacted the Merced County sheriff, and started plotting to produce a film based on the same story, but styled to look like a Mexican soap opera.

When it premiered in the cafeteria of Merced's Margaret Sheehy Elementary School last month, the children sat entranced. As the narrator delivered somber anti-drug declarations in Spanish, a few third-graders wiped away tears.

"Kids, I'm here to tell you we don't make any of this up," said Merced County Sheriff Mark Pazin. "It is happening here in the Central Valley, in California and the U.S. People are getting sick and passing away."

In 2003, more than 80 percent of the arrests for meth production in Merced, Fresno and Madera counties were of people working for Mexican cartels, said Pazin. The county assigned a social worker to accompany police on drug busts, since meth cooks are often arrested at home in front of spouses and children.