If You’ve Got Bad News, and You Want to Kick Them Blues; Cocaine.

One evening around 10pm I was sitting with some friends downtown, just hanging out. We were approached by a girl about 10 years old and her younger brother.  I thought they’d ask for some change, but instead the girl asked us for some cigarettes and when we didn’t give them she listed off more swear words than even I knew. While she was talking her little brother was hyperventilating into a brown paper bag, then she chased him down for the bag and started breathing into it as well. It’s common to see kids on the street at night, who’s parents are out cleaning up cardboard and other recyclables, passing their time by inhaling the fumes from liquid glue.  My friends explained to me that this wasn’t even that big of a deal, there were worse drugs out there. “What drug can poor kids afford that is worse than glue?” I asked, “Paco” they all replied at the same time.

Thanks to the film industry with movies such as Blow, Scarface, and Requiem For a Dream, when South America or Colombia is mentioned, most people first think of one thing: Cocaine.  However, what they don’t know is that Argentina is the second largest cocaine market in South America.  “In relative terms, the results of the 2006 household survey suggest that Argentina has the highest annual prevalence rate of cocaine use in South America and the second highest in the Americas after the USA. Over the 1999-2006 period, the annual prevalence rate rose from 1.9% to 2.6%. In addition, 0.5% of the population age 12-65 admitted to having used ‘pasta base’ (cocaine paste) in 2006.” (see Links: Naciones Unidas). Alongside cocaine, there has been a rise in Argentina is the use of amphetamines, ecstasy, marijuana, and opiates.

In many of Argentina’s slums, especially in the capital of Buenos Aires, there has been a surge of a new drug on the market. It’s cheap, easy to obtain, and highly addictive. Sounds almost too perfect to be true.  “Paco”

Paco sold in small bags

is a highly addictive, smokeable cocaine residue that has destroyed thousands of lives in Argentina and caused a cycle of drug-induced street violence, police corruption, and deaths never seen before.  It costs about 2 or 3 pesos a hit, which is around $1 Canadian for a 15-minute high. This increase in drug use has been fueled by porous borders, economic hardship, and the continuous growth of the coca leaf which is the base of cocaine.  The devastating financial crisis of late 2001 turned places like Ciudad Oculta into now what are known as ‘villas miserias’ or towns of misery, and are easily exploitable markets of impoverished people looking for an easy, quick escape.  Cocaine has become a drug now available to everyone, not just the rich, even children as young as 10 smoke paco in slums around the city.  “They swap food for drugs and then eat from the bins…It rots their brains. Punishment doesn’t work because the addict is sick, he can’t help it.”

Paco is highly addictive because the intense effects last just a few minutes so most users smoke 20 to 50 paco cigarettes a day to try and keep the feeling continuous.  It’s more toxic than crack cocaine because it’s made mostly of solvents and chemicals like kerosene, with just a tiny bit of cocaine.  The chemicals required to transform cocaine paste into the powdered cocaine became difficult to transport and government officials had cracked down on them. As a result, the quality of the cocaine has also fallen and the European market has rejected it, turning the flow of less than 30% pure cocaine into countries like Argentina and Brazil.

Despite it’s harmful affects on the body and the constant need to have more, other social and economic effects keep addicts addicted. The problem runs much deeper than porous borders and a lack of constraint on traffickers. “The lack of money isn’t the nightmare [said of the economic crisis]… it’s the pressure that it causes in a person, the desperation and the depression… [he said he] was looking for a way to not feel anything, to not feel sadness, to find a way not to cry.”

45-year old paco user, Ciudad Oculta

smoking paco

Click on the photo on the right to see a slideshow of photos from Ciudad Oculta.

Within the past 5 years, the growth of the presence of Paco on the street has become immense.  There have been talks of higher security, more seizures, rehabilitation centers, community groups such as Mothers Against Paco and most recently talks of decriminalization.

In the first six months of this year, the seizure of cocaine and paco in the province of Buenos Aires has quadrupled in relation to the same period in 2007.  In this time, the police seized 1,153 kilograms of cocaine, while last year had been 262 kilograms.  And the dose of Paco confiscated were 35,035, against 7,822 of the first previous semester.   “I do not believe that the increase is because have more drug in the province, but because there were more interventions in search to control those crimes”, said Trumpet the superintendent of Illicit Drugs of the of Buenos Aires.

Argentine government officials have increased money in recent years for drug prevention, education, and rehabilitation, but other than recently the talks of decriminalization, they have yet to announce any other plans to tackle this problem.  What’s left is overwhelmed law enforcement officials who are left to simply tracking and finding the operations and not dealing with the crime caused by users and their traffickers.  What has sprung up in place of the government is a community group, led by the mothers of paco users. They say that before there were codes and the dealers would never sell to young kids and the users would never use in public.  Now there are no codes and the mothers are trying to enforce some.

Calling their organization ‘Las Madres en Lucha’  (the mothers in fight),  they meet in small groups and

Las Madres en Lucha

occasionally large groups in different poor districts of the province of Buenos Aires and within the city.  Gathering to seek solutions and try and get the government to help their children from what they call “a drug of extermination that attacks the most poor”.  Tackling their own shame and fear, they organize with marches and removing the ‘newsstands’ (where paco and other drugs are sold), but they struggle to remove the delivery of the drugs into their neighbourhoods.  Their main point is that what is most important is that there needs to be a political decision to put an end to the problem and that the State has to work alongside the mothers.  Together, these mothers have had meetings with officials, former officials and provincial legislators with proposals on prevention, attention, and contention of the youths “so that they study, they work, and they have a future without drugs.”

So far, the response of the government has been talks of decriminalization of drugs. In the week of August 1st of this year, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner called to decriminalize personal drug use and crack down on traffickers and dealers.  “I don’t like it when people easily condemn someone who has an addiction as if he were a criminal, as if her were a person who should be persecuted” she told a meeting of the National Investigan into the Consumption of Alcohol, Tobacco, Psychopharmaceuticals and Illegal Drugs.  “Those who should be persecuted are those who sell the substances, those who give it away, those who traffic in it.”

One thing that we are all sure of is that we recognize that drugs are currently doing a great deal of harm. What divides us is our judgment about the best means to minimize the harm done by drugs.  When discussing drugs, most people end up at the philosophical disagreement with two sides:

1) It is right for some of us to tell others what they must do because it is good for them; and

2) The role of government is simply to prevent people from doing harm to others and that it is not right for government to try to force people to do anything simply for their own good.

With these debates in mind, to me it appears that the Mothers are trying to seek help from the government, and the government is trying to not take any responsibility.  Also in recent news the proposal for decriminalization has not been viewed upon favourably.  People are saying the state has completely abandoned addicted kids and adults and that “decriminalization is just another way for them to wash their hands of the problem.”  However, should people who are caught with small amounts of a substance be treated as criminals, or as victims? If drugs were decriminalized up to a certain amount, would the police have more time to dedicate to arresting dealers and breaking up trafficking rings?

Milton Friedman also makes an interesting point in saying, “The obvious implication is that if currently illicit drugs were decriminalized and handled exactly the way alcohol is now handled, there is no reason to suppose that there would be a vast increase in the number of addicts. That is by no means a certainty, but every statement that I have seen asserting the contrary is based on pure conjecture and hypothesis. I have seen no hard evidence. The closest to it that I have come across is reference to the opium craze in China. Given the evidence we have-not only from alcohol prohibition but also from Holland, Alaska, and others-the burden of proof, it seems to me, is on those who maintain that there would be a completely unacceptable increase in the number of addicts.”

Overall, I believe it’s a social, family, and cultural problem that has been deeply rooted into society.  It’s a difficult subject and I feel deeply saddened every time I see a young kid using drugs, or even a grown man smoking Paco on the street. Each time I wonder what can be done to help or if it is beyond the means of one person, even one generation, to turn things around.

Until next time.