Brazil battles drug epidemic

Gabriela Sousa de Jesus’s life story, muttered in short bursts between crack cocaine-induced highs, is almost unbelievable.

Her eyes rolling in their sockets, the addict recounts how she worked as a nanny before she started using crack at 12-years old. Now 27, she is five months pregnant with her sixth child. Her mother was raped and murdered four years ago so her children live with her father, who is also a user and into “crime”. She pays for her “pedras”, or rocks, of crack through street prostitution even though she has syphilis.

“I don’t have HIV yet, thank God, but most of my friends do,” she says, as she stuffs down a baguette provided by evangelist Christian groups working in this park in inner São Paulo.

Ms Sousa de Jesus is just one victim of a drug epidemic that has been growing in Brazil for decades. Beside the park is São Paulo’s inner city ghetto known as Cracolândia – Crack Land. This was home to hundreds of drug users and traffickers until a few weeks ago, when police drove them out with teargas and rubber bullets.

The police action is the highest-profile effort yet by Brazil’s biggest city to tackle its drug problem. It comes amid a R4bn national campaign to combat crack addiction as the country prepares to host the football World Cup in 2014. At the same time, a recent police strike in Salvador – which ended this weekend – resulted in the deaths of 178 people and highlighted the depth of Brazil’s law and order problem.

“For everyone it is a big surprise that the [crack] problem is now so huge,” says Arthur Guerra, a professor at the University of São Paulo and expert on drug and alcohol abuse in Brazil. “I guess we made some mistakes in recent years.”

São Paulo’s Cracolândia first emerged in the 1980s when Brazil became a transit point for the cocaine trade between the South American producing countries – mainly Colombia, Bolivia and Peru – and Europe.

“In 2009, Brazil was the most prominent transit country in the Americas – in terms of number of seizures – for cocaine consignments seized in Europe,” the United Nations said in its World Drug Report 2011. It said number of seizure cases involving Brazil as a transit point rose from 25 in 2005 to 260 in 2009, or from 339kg to 1.5 tonnes.

Along the way, the traffickers discovered a ready market in Latin America’s biggest economy, including for crack, which costs as little as R5 a rock. Between 2004 and 2009, the amount of cocaine seized in Brazil rose threefold. Although data on the number of crack users are unavailable, a study of Brazil’s municipalities shows that 91 per cent of the 4,430 cities surveyed have a crack problem, from São Paulo to the Amazon.

“It’s a Latin American problem,” says Eloisa de Sousa Arruda, secretary of justice for São Paulo state, of the drug trade. “We don’t produce cocaine here.”

Even so, São Paulo city claims it is Brazil’s most advanced municipality in dealing with crack. Since 2009, it has established health clinics for users and has employed hundreds of workers to roam the streets to help addicts.

Following the police action in Cracolândia, 186 users have been treated for addiction, scores arrested and nearly 64kg of drugs seized, says Januário Montone, São Paulo municipal secretary of health.

The problem in Brazil, however, argues Mr Montone, is that except in extreme circumstances there is no compulsory treatment of addicts, as in some other countries. This means they usually leave treatment after a few days, quickly relapsing into drug use and returning to the streets.

He say Brazil needs a national discourse to debate legal reforms such as making treatment obligatory for those caught in possession of drugs. “If this debate does not happen, we will continue to go around in circles,” he says.

For now, though, Cracolândia is free of traffickers. During a recent public holiday, Christian groups staged a noisy parade through the area. They are at the vanguard of what is expected to be a middle class revival of the district, which is surrounded by many of the city’s finest historic buildings and much potentially valuable real estate.

“The idea is just to get these people off the streets,” says Adriano da Costa, a member of the “Snowball” church, a popular evangelist group started by a Brazilian surfer.

But while the drug problem has moved on the area, few believe it has disappeared. In the park, crack addicts lie comatose below a huge monument to the Duke of Caixas, a 19th century Brazilian war hero, ignoring a music festival being staged for their benefit by church groups.

Jacques Francis Moreira, an addict wandering through the area barefoot, explains the crux of the problem. It is impossible to quit crack, he says. “It’s just so strong, the addiction is so strong.”