Escorted by police through this “cracolandia,” or crackland, they look behind cardboard lean-tos, in corners hidden by overgrown weeds for drug users who emerge, dazed, from ragged blankets. Some fight and run. One frantic young woman, her pregnant belly bulging under her short top, starts crying and pulling at her hair as police officers securing the area try to pacify her.
“Calm down, Taiane. Calm down,” says an officer who knows her. “Look at me. It’s me.”
About two decades after the US emerged from the worst of its own crack epidemic, Brazilian authorities are watching the cheap drug spread across this country of 190 million people. They have far fewer resources to deal with it, despite a booming economy that expanded 7.5% last year.
No corner of Brazil has been spared. A recent survey by the National Federation of Counties found 98% of them had registered traffic or consumption of crack.
In Sao Paulo, the first place in Brazil to have a large consumer market for the drug beginning in the 1990s, police seizure of crack went from 595 kilos in 2006 to 1,636 kilos in 2009, according to federal police. In Rio de Janeiro, arrests related to crack jumped from 546 in 2009 to 2,597 in 2010, according to the research arm of Rio’s public safety department.
This spike happened even as consumption of the drug started to dwindle in the US According to the UN’s World Drug Report 2011, a squeeze on supplies coming from Mexico drove prices up by more than 80% between 2006 and 2009.
Meanwhile, Brazil became the main transit country for cocaine streaming from the producing Andean nations to Europe, the report said. With a growing economy after years of hyperinflation, Brazilians also had more cash to spend on drugs.
Soon, more crack was being seized in Brazil than in the US. The UN report indicates 163 kilos were seized in the US in 2009, only 10% of what Brazilian police say they seized in Sao Paulo alone in the same year.
“For us doctors, there is a crack epidemic,” said Ricardo Paiva, who monitors the spread of the drug for the National Council of Medicine, a group representing doctors. “We feel we’re losing the war.”
It’s a deadly battle. Research by the Federal University of Sao Paulo showed that after five years, one-third of crack users had died, most of them from violence.
A federal government plan to fight the drug was signed in May 2010, with a budget of $253 million. Critics said from the beginning the resources weren’t nearly enough. A year later, implementation was lagging. Of the funds budgeted, only $57 million had been allocated, and of that, only $3 million spent.
“It’s been just talk,” said Paiva. “This is a serious public health problem, and the government cannot be absent.”
Calls and emails to the federal department of drug control, under the Justice Ministry, were not returned, though officials agree the situation is critical.
In a recent deposition before Congress, Pedro Delgado, the Health Ministry’s coordinator for mental health, drug and alcohol abuse, said Brazil has about 600,000 crack users.
Crack is cheap enough, at $3 a rock, to reach street children and the unemployed, Delgado told the representatives.
In the recent sweep of the cracolandia between the Manguinhos slum and the Mandela complex of shantytowns in Rio, 58 users who had been living in the streets were picked up. Ten were teenagers or children. At least three women were far along in their pregnancies. They had little schooling, scant or no access to health care and no contact with the social programmes that could have helped them.
Sitting in the sun a few feet away from the pile of drugs and weapons seized in the raid, Pricila Nascimento ate her fill of crackers washed down with soda. Only 17, she bore the marks of four years spent in the streets: Missing teeth, a couple of long scars on her legs. She toyed with her hair clips as she spoke.
One of eight children, she studied until 5th grade, then left home. In the streets, she met young men who ran drugs and introduced her to crack, at first mixed with marijuana or tobacco, then straight. She lost track of her parents long ago.
“My mother always taught me to take care of myself,” she said. She begs for money, and steals when she has the chance. “I tell you, I don’t go hungry.”
Until March, minors like Nascimento were picked up by police then released back to the streets, where a girl will prostitute herself just to inhale smoke from a man’s pipe, said Valeria Aragao, head of the police’s juvenile section.
She and Rodrigo Bethlem, the city’s head of social welfare, teamed up with police in a pilot programme aimed at changing the abusive, violence-prone life, at least for the minors.
“When parents can’t take care of their children, their welfare is everyone’s responsibility,” Aragao said. “We have to guarantee their right to dignity and life.”
The children and teenagers picked up since 31 May are being returned to their families, if a family can be found, or forced into shelters especially set up to detox them with medical support.
Four centres with 145 beds in all are set aside for the programme, and 40 more are planned. The adults are offered treatment, but aren’t forced into a shelter. Walter Maierovitch, a former drug czar, proposes programmes that offer adults health services and a safe place to use drugs. “Insisting on programmes that demand abstinence doesn’t work,” he said. “The government can’t just sweep people up.”
Bethlem says: “There’s been a real abandonment, an absence of the state” in dealing with the crisis. His fear is that Rio’s crackland will become a fixture like Sao Paulo’s. “We can’t start to think this is common, acceptable, to have people living like this,” he said.