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Argentine Slums Mired in New Drug Problem
Kelly Hearn
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Cocaine is commonly transported in bricks, as shown
here. “Paco" is a cheap, highly toxic ghetto drug made from
the once discarded chemical remnants of the cocaine-making
process. (Wikipedia)
Click image to enlarge.
"They keep the drug in that tree,” says Mario, a middle-aged factory owner in a low-lying industrial suburb of Buenos Aires. “We call the police all of the time, but they keep coming back.”
Across the street three teenagers huddle together on bikes, furtively watching out for customers.
The knot of suspicious activity is an increasingly common sight here in Argentina, where “paco,” Spanish for PAsta de Cocaina, is now public health enemy number one in the country’s poorest neighborhoods.
A cheap, highly toxic ghetto drug made from the once discarded chemical remnants of the cocaine-making process, paco’s deadly popularity has risen after Argentina’s economic crash in 2001-02, especially among the young and poor.
Experts paint a harrowing picture of paco’s physical and emotional impacts.
In 2005, for example, Claudio Mate, a ranking health official from Buenos Aires’ provincial government, told a leading newspaper that paco causes “cerebral death” in as little as six months.
It is “cocaine’s garbage,” says Dr. Ricardo Nadra, a government psychiatrist who says the drug causes insomnia, agitation, loss of appetite and cerebral lesions.
Statistics on paco usage trouble health experts who sound alarms that Argentina’s youngest citizens are at greatest risk.
In 2005, Argentine Secretary for Prevention of Drug Addiction and Control of Narcotrafficking reported that paco experienced the highest increase in adolescent use over the previous two years. And government studies estimate that 70,000 Argentines between sixteen and twenty-six years old in the greater Buenos Aires area have used paco at least once.
In many villas, addicts and families of addicts talk of a harrowingly predictable addiction trajectory.
Users describe being hooked by the first use, of needing more, sacrificing everything and eventually ending up as bone-thin, wraith-like addicts who sell clothes and household appliances, turn to crime, all to keep up the flow of “dosis,” or packets that cost around 30 cents and provide a high that lasts only a few minutes.
Paco addicts are commonly called “muertos vivo,” or walking dead.
Why has the use of paco risen so much in the last years?
Experts like Nadra says the main reason is economic: People simply could not afford drugs like marijuana after the crisis.
But a new study released October 6, 2006 says paco is gaining in popularity not because its affordability appeals to poor. It is increasing because there is more “garbage” to go around--thanks to a shift in continental drug patterns.
U.S. and Argentine officials, for example, have long considered the country to be merely a transshipment point for Andean cocaine bound for Europe and the U.S, not a fabrication point.
The U.S. State Department’s most recent annual drug report, for example, classifies Argentina as “a transit country for cocaine from Bolivia, Peru and Colombia primarily to European destinations.” The report also says Argentina is “a source for precursor chemicals” for making cocaine.
But the new report co-funded by The Transnational Institute, based in Holland, and the Argentina-based Civil Association for the Study of and Attention to Drug-Related Problems, says cocaine production is moving to Argentina (and to a degree, neighboring Uruguay) in part due to the relatively low costs of precursor chemicals.
The study notes that cocaine seizures for the first half of 2006 were equal to the total number of seizes for the previous year.
“For the drug agencies this is an indication that the modus operandi of the drug traffickers is no longer exclusive to the Andean-Amazon region where cocaine fabrication has traditionally been carried out,” the report says.
“Our country has gone from a country of consumption and trafficking to a country that produces cocaine,” a leading Argentine politician, Elisa Carrió, recently wrote in a public letter.
Carrio, who spearheaded a study of paco that was carried out by a group of left-leaning politicians here, says the drug is the “tip of the iceberg” and reflective of the growth in cocaine manufacturing.
Why the shift in cocaine making to the so-called Southern Cone of South America?
Experts say there are many reasons.
The State Department’s most recent annual drug report says Argentine law enforcement authorities “have expressed concern that the potential for political turmoil in neighboring Bolivia or a weakening in that nation’s commitment to combating narcotics trafficking could greatly increase the amount of narcotics transiting Argentina.”
Diana Rossi, an Argentine researcher who worked on the TNI study, told Insight that while the shift of cocaine making south to Argentina is largely based on profit motives, it could also be prompted by U.S.-funded anti-drug efforts in Colombia and other Andean nations.
"The changes in drug trafficking typically have different reasons,” she said. “One of them could be the foreign policy of the United States with respect to the countries that have traditionally cultivated coca leaves.”
The TNI report, created from several dozen interviews with addicts, also challenges the predominate view that paco is chiefly an adolescent’s drug.
"We doubt the stereotype perpetuated in the television that the average consumer is an adolescent, nearly a child, poor and marginalized, and that they deteriorate and die within six month without a chance for intervention,” another of the study’s authors, Victoria Rangugni, told IPS news service.
The TNI report interviewed many long-term users who are in their 30s and 40s.
Other drug experts including Pablo Rafael Kodrec, director of a Buenos Aires rehabilitation center, says paco’s quick potential for destruction actually helps get addicts into treatment more quickly that other drugs that can be used over long periods by functioning addicts.
Whatever the case, media reports reinforce the image of paco as a social scourge.
On October 8, 2006, for example, the Spanish news service DyN reported that a 34-year-old mother was arrested in Quilmes, Argentina for trying to sell her daughter in order to buy the drug.
Those reports are motivating communities and police to do something.
In December 2005, Argentina passed a law that gave provincial law enforcement divisions the responsibility to enforce drug laws, a jurisdiction previously reserved for Argentina’s federal officials.
Arrests followed: In February 2006, provincial police confiscated 7,000 doses of paco in some twenty operations.
But critics complain that few dealers actually get taken off the street: of 1,724 drug arrests between December 11, 2005 and January 29, 2006, only 3 percent were related to paco, according to government data cited by a leading Argentine paper, Pagina12.
Police officials have played down public expectations and stressed that the new law would not convert quickly into arrests for trafficking.
Martín Arias Duval of Buenos Aires’s provincial ministry of security told regional media that police are in “a transition period” and that catching traffickers requires case building not simple street arrests.
The TNI report notes another troubling tendency: the shift from larger cocaine manufacturing operations to smaller home-based operations in Argentina ghettos.
The study cites numerous interviews, describing "cocinas,” or kitchens, typically located in the slums.
The report described a kind of “family kitchen,” whereby the "woman of the house" makes the recipe while the kids stay on the lookout for police.
“It appears that these 'family factories' are the last link of an extraordinarily profitable business,” the report says.
It also adds that family kitchens do not produce cocaine for exports but instead only dilute the cocaine residue with kerosene or other chemicals, rendering it ready to smoke by local customers.
"It’s the small part of a big business, a substance of little quality and low price,” the report says.
Argentine officials have taken an inclusive approach to the problem, asking for help from nonprofit organizations, universities and civil society.
Meanwhile, in June 2006, a new organization called Mothers of the Plaza proposed a program to encourage people to report small, clandestine laboratories.
The group is also calling for "urgent revision of constitutional and legal frameworks that are impeding” prosecution drug offenders.
Much like U.S. authorities have cracked down on the purchase of chemicals used for making crystal methamphetamine, Argentine officials have created the register of precursor chemicals used to make cocaine and paco.
Leonardo Gorbacz, a national lawmaker who was involved in the study headed by Carrio, said Argentine government officials estimate 400,000 doses of paco are consumed each day in Argentina.
Speaking in a recent television interview, he said he disagrees with theory that paco is consumed because users have little money.
"I believe that the price is not the definitive factor, but the fact that paco has a particular immediate effect and generates a much more immediate sensation,” he said, adding that the high from paco is shorter than that produced by cocaine.
If legislators behind the study are planning to promote new legislation, he said.
The measure will attempt to address social isolation, which he says is the root cause of drug addiction.
"Until now, what we have talked about is the state adopting measures to reduce the sale of drugs or eliminate it,” he says. “But this is not going to do the trick, because even if we have control of the drug supply we are not resolving the situation of social desperation, the lack of meaning in life that leads these young people to consume drugs.”
What’s more, the lawmakers report, also released in recent weeks, alleges that that corruption lies behind the rising cocaine and paco problem.
"Argentina has entered a new phase of the global fabrication of drugs," the report’s authors said in September 2006. "This is only possible with the complicity either by action or own mission of the sector's link
According to Sebastian Cinquerrui, another Argentine legislator, who worked on the report, some there are some communities where paco has not penetrated because of “a high level of social consciousness.”
“There was a case…where a band of people came to the barrio in a 4x4 vehicle and targeted people selling paco, going house to house, confiscating money and drugs,” he said. “They went to a football field, which is like a central plaza of the (ghetto), and made a bonfire, burning all the money in the drugs. They essentially became Robin Hood's, acting much in the style of the original Italian Mafia.”
Argentine pharmacologist Dr. Roberto Baistrocchi says the fact that paco is smoked rather than sniffed increases the potential for addiction. He also says that the mix of chemicals that are used to dilute paco have their own physiological effect and create their own patterns of physical damage.
Baistrocchi says he believes paco is the most dangerous of all drugs.
The TNI study also attempts to break myths about paco, particularly the notion that only poor people in the slums are consumers. It notes that the geography of the drug has spread to the middle class in middle and upper class neighborhoods. It is still generally considered a slum drug, however, because the middle-class users are hidden from public view, the report says. What's more, richer middle class users do not show the physical damage of the drug because they are typically in better physical condition to begin with.
Kelly Hearn is a former UPI staff reporter and the recipient
of the 2006 Samuel Chavkin Grant for Investigative
Journalism.
He is a frequent contributor to The Washington Times
foreign desk with several A1 stories and two Sunday Special
Reports in 2006. He has been published in The Wall Street
Journal, Insight on the News, The Nation,
Grist Magazine and is currently under contract with
National Geographic News and The Sydney Morning
Herald.
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