In the dark before dawn, social workers advance slowly down a narrow road dividing two vast slums, entering a landscape of littered streets and broken-down shacks, where an open-air crack cocaine market does business among piles of rubble.
Escorted by police through this cracolandia, or crackland, they look behind cardboards, in corners hidden by overgrown weeds for drug users who emerge, dazed, from ragged blankets. Some fight and run. One 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 percent last year.
No corner of Brazil has been spared. A recent survey by the National Federation of Counties found 98 percent 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 last year, 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 percent between 2006 and 2009. Brazil then 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 says 163 kilos were seized in the US in 2009, only 10 percent 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 last year, with a budget of US$253 million. Critics said from the beginning the resources weren’t nearly enough. A year later, implementation was lagging. Of the funds budgeted, only US$57 million had been allocated, and of that, only US$3 million spent.
“It’s been just talk,” Paiva said. “This is a serious public health problem, and the government cannot be absent.”
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was