Crack cocaine epidemic sweeps Brazil from the Amazon to Rio

At street level the consequences of addiction are dramatic: murder, robbery and destruction of families

Drug users gather outdoors at a so-called cracolandia to trade and smoke crack cocaine in São Paulo, Brazil.

Past a roadblock, improvised from charred tree trunks and concrete sewer pipes, sits a muscle-bound man in flip-flops, with an AR-15 assault rifle cradled in his lap.

“Crack is the devil in rock form,” he says baldly. “If one of my employees started smoking crack I’d confiscate his gun and kick him out of the gang.”

The man is a drug boss from one of Rio de Janeiro‘s three main drug factions. He sells crack from his shanty town on the city’s western edge, in the latest scourge to afflict Rio.

Until recently the city’s gangsters largely refused to sell crack, fearful of the effect it would have on their clientele. But over the past few years economics have trumped good sense. The floodgates have opened.

“The use of crack is growing at a terrifying rate. In the last four years it has grown a great deal,” says Julio Cesar Pereira de Oliveira, the director of a dilapidated civil police jail in northern Rio, where 10 damp and overcrowded cells are now packed with more than 360 prisoners, many of them addicts.

“The majority are in here because of drugs,” he says, reeling off a list of the most common drug-related crimes, according to their numbers in the Brazilian penal code: “155. 157. 121. 33.” Theft. Armed robbery. Homicide. Drug trafficking.

Rio is one of the last parts of Brazil to experience the crack epidemic, which now stretches from remote Amazon towns to the country’s more affluent south and south-east.

According to recent reports in the Brazilian press, police in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco have seized the equivalent of 6.8m rocks of crack this year alone.

Before her historic election win last year, Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, appeared in a televised campaign, telling the nation: “Crack is a crime against people, a crime against our youth and a crime against Brazil.”

A £155m anti-crack plan was unveiled by the federal government last year and in February Rousseff announced nationwide plans to train nearly 15,000 health agents to deal with crack addicts. But at street level the scale of the challenge becomes clear.

“Crack is terrible. It just makes people kill, rob and destroy other people’s families,” says Rafael Barbosa dos Santos, a 22-year-old father of two and one of dozens of addicts detained by police after a dawn raid on one drug market in the Morro do Cajueiro favela.

“I’d been there since Saturday,” he says. “Today is Thursday. I was taking drugs. Your money runs out and you still want to smoke more, so you have to go on to the streets to steal, to beg. It’s dog eat dog – either you make it work or you die trying.”

A few miles away, in the hilltop Jorge Turco favela, a police operative pulls back a filthy bedsheet and steps into the area’s crack house – an abandoned, redbrick shack at one of the slum’s entrances. “We come and burn it down and they clean it up again,” he complains. “We come here frequently. We come here and kick them out. But when we leave, they come back.”

Inside, two addicts lay on sofas, oblivious to the police presence. Melted plastic cups, used to smoke the drug, littered the floor. A sudden volley of automatic fire signals the demise of one local gang member, gunned down by police further up the hill. Still the addicts snooze.

“Crack is the church’s biggest challenge at the moment,” said Claudio Ferreira, a 33-year-old preacher who conducts his own “spiritual” raids in Rio’s crack dens, searching for lost souls. “But the Bible teaches us that what is impossible for man is not impossible for God. I believe that out of every 100 addicts, five will hear the word and manage not to use crack any more. That is a victory. Society is lost. Society thinks these people have no future. In saving five lives we are victorious.”

In Rio, a growing public outcry over the spread of crack has prompted action. Since late May, authorities have conducted almost weekly raids on the city’s cracolandias, the name given here to open-air crack markets that operate in and around several of Rio’s most notorious favelas. Those detained are, controversially, being forced to undergo compulsory detox treatment in four rehab centres.

But preachers remain unconvinced that the cleanup will work. “Unfortunately, society will not do anything. Society takes them to recovery centres for treatment … but it doesn’t work. One month or two weeks later they are back on the streets,” says Ferreira during a midnight incursion into a crack den, deep inside a favela.

“The only way for a crack addict to recover is through the word of Christ.”

Crack cocaine epidemic sweeps Brazil from the Amazon to Rio | World news | The Guardian.

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Paris Hilton-Bruno Mars prosecutor arrested on cocaine charges

By Daily Mail Reporter
22nd March 2011

 

Accused: High-profile drugs prosecutor David Schubert has been arrested for allegedly buying crack cocaine

The prosecutor who leads some of Las Vegas‘s most high-profile drugs cases has been arrested – for allegedly buying crack cocaine.

David Charles Schubert, 47, prosecuted Paris Hilton after her arrest on cocaine charges last year, and most recently took on singer Bruno Mars for possession of the same drug.

Now he faces a criminal investigation  after police allegedly caught him buying crack cocaine through a street dealer – who claimed Schubert buys $40 of cocaine  three or four times a week.

A patrol officer stopped the deputy district attorney‘s BMW in Las Vegas on Saturday afternoon when he spotted what he thought was a drugs transaction.

According to an arrest report seen by TMZ, the officer watched Schubert pick up a black man from an apartment block, then drive to another address where he dropped him off.

Schubert drove round for several minutes and then picked up the man again, police claim. The officer pulled the car over, but the suspected dealer jumped out and fled.

Police gave chase and took him into custody. According to the arrest report, the man, named as Raymond Streeter, told officers he knew Schubert as ‘Joe’.

‘Joe’ had called him three or four times a week for the last six to seven months, Streeter claimed, given him $40 and driven him to an address to buy cocaine, the report alleges.

Schubert was taken into custody and booked on cocaine possession charges. His two Las Vegas homes were searched and police took a blood sample, the Review-Journal reports.

 

High-profile: Schubert, left, brought a drugs case case against singer Bruno Mars last year, centre. Mars pleaded guilty to possessing cocaine

Mr Roger told 8 News Now: ‘I just can’t wrap my head around the idea that a prosecutor who knows the dangers of drugs would try crack cocaine.’

He has suspended Schubert – who earned $119,000 in 2009 – from his post, and has already started the process to fire him.

Schubert’s badge has been seized and his computer secured.

According to the Review-Journal, investigators are also looking into whether he may have compromised any previous cases.

The prosecutor has worked for Clark County district attorney’s office since 2002. He leads a state drugs task force and has been assigned some of its most high-profile cases.

 

Celebrity cases: Deputy district attorney David Schubert is seen here, right, with Paris Hilton, who he prosecuted on cocaine charges last year

Mr Roger told the newspaper: ‘It’s disheartening to know the individual who I assigned to prosecute high-level drug cases is allegedly using rock cocaine.

‘His future is bleak with the district attorney’s office.’

In February Schubert prosecuted the case against singer Bruno Mars – real name Peter Hernandez – who admitted to possessing cocaine in a plea deal. He was sentenced to a year of informal probation.

And last year he prosecuted  Paris Hilton, who pleaded guilty to misdemeanour charges after police found 0.8grams of cocaine in her handbag.

Lawyer David Chesnoff, who represented both celebrities, told the Review-Journal he wouldn’t speak badly of Schubert.

He said: ‘I’m a big believer in the Constitution. I believe everyone is innocent until proven guilty. And I always root for the underdog.

‘I will say this: David’s always been a real professional and always treated me with respect, so I wish him the best.’

Schubert also prosecuted the case of Steven Zegrean, who was convicted for shooting four people at the New York-New York casino in 2007.

His case has been assigned to the attorney general. If found guilty, he could face up to four years in a Nevada jail.

Paris Hilton-Bruno Mars prosecutor arrested on cocaine charges | Mail Online.

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Why Britain tops world drug use league

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Over the summer, Mexican government officials began briefing reporters about the cocaine war destabilising the Latin American state. Much of their ire was directed north across the border, towards the country with the highest number of cocaine users in the world. Now Mexico’s counter-narcotics officials can no longer blame the US for having the planet’s worst cocaine problem. Britain’s inexorable appetite for the Class A substance last week, perhaps inevitably, finally outstripped America’s.

Confirmation that the UK has moved to the summit of the European and US “league table” for cocaine use follows analysis by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, which reports that 6.2% of Britons between the ages of 15 to 34 said they had used cocaine in the last year. This compares with 4.5% of Americans – the second biggest users – in the same age group. Almost 15% of all young Britons have tried the drug at least once.

Britain, along with Spain, has hovered near the top of the European cocaine table in six out of the past seven years. Yet Spain’s high cocaine use is partly explained by geographical factors, its location doubling as the drug’s continental transit point from South America.

By contrast, explanation for UK use can be sought, in part, from the structure of its youth culture; its emphasis on hedonism and experimentation coalescing to create a voracious appetite among young Britons for substance use, certainly when compared to other European states. Cocaine use in the UK has become normalised, as a consensus on what substances are morally unacceptable becomes less defined.

Perhaps the more compelling answer to cocaine’s growing popularity is found in the rapidly changing image of the substance. Only five years ago, former Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Ian Blair derided “middle-class” cocaine users, a provocative attack on its use among the rich and successful. In 2010 cocaine can no longer be construed as the yuppie drug, the naughty secret of the movers and shakers. These days the substance cannot even be considered a club drug. Mystique once surrounded cocaine, with many perceiving it a drug for “winners”, but all that has gone. Now cocaine use permeates all classes, from top to bottom. Price is a factor; it’s cheaper than ever. Experts talk of “child-friendly” prices, “beginners’ offers” and “group discounts”.

Latest prices indicate a line of cocaine can work out at as cheap as £1, while analysts claim an average price is somewhere between £2 and £4. With a £4 pint not uncommon and a glass of house white retailing at around £3.50, the temptation to young people is evident. The falling cost, though, has coincided with a plummeting purity – often below 10% – but as the market proves, people, particularly teenagers, are happy to pay for an inferior, cheaper product.

Cocaine acts upon the reward chemical dopamine in the body, deceiving the user into feeling successful, however short-lived and however much the rewards are diminishing.

Interestingly, cocaine’s increasing popularity is not a unique trend in the British drugs market; its growth has also been mirrored in a surging demand for amphetamine-style drugs, substances that effectively mimic the effects of cocaine at equally cheap prices. The success of mephedrone, the former legal high that could be easily bought online until reclassified by the government in April this year, underlined the size of the UK drug market among people.

Last week’s report by the EU’s drug agency also found that 24 new “legal highs” were identified in Europe for the first time last year with 15 entirely new narcotic substances uncovered by mid-July. More will surely follow and already the police have said they do not possess the resources to crack down on and test the number of new substances emerging online. Another issue, yet unanswered, is quantifying how many young people are ingesting these legal highs? Most experts agree Britain probably tops that league table, too.

Why Britain tops world drug use league | Society | The Observer.

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Alcohol the most lethal drug: study

Alcohol is more dangerous than illegal drugs like heroin and crack cocaine, according to a new study.

British experts evaluated substances including alcohol, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and marijuana, ranking them based on how destructive they are to the individual who takes them and to society as a whole.

Researchers analyzed how addictive a drug is and how it harms the human body, in addition to other criteria like environmental damage caused by the drug, its role in breaking up families and its economic costs, such as health care, social services, and prison.

Heroin, crack cocaine and methamphetamine, or crystal meth, were the most lethal to individuals. When considering their wider social effects, alcohol, heroin and crack cocaine were the deadliest. But overall, alcohol outranked all other substances, followed by heroin and crack cocaine. Marijuana, ecstasy and LSD scored far lower.

The study was paid for by Britain’s Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and was published online Monday in the medical journal, Lancet.

Experts said alcohol scored so high because it is so widely used and has devastating consequences not only for drinkers but for those around them.

“Just think about what happens (with alcohol) at every football game,” said Wim van den Brink, a professor of psychiatry and addiction at the University of Amsterdam. He was not linked to the study and co-authored a commentary in the Lancet.

When drunk in excess, alcohol damages nearly all organ systems. It is also connected to higher death rates and is involved in a greater percentage of crime than most other drugs, including heroin.

But experts said it would be impractical and incorrect to outlaw alcohol.

“We cannot return to the days of prohibition,” said Leslie King, an adviser to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and one of the study’s authors. “Alcohol is too embedded in our culture and it won’t go away.”

Mr. King said countries should target problem drinkers, not the vast majority of people who indulge in a drink or two. He said governments should consider more education programs and raising the price of alcohol so it isn’t as widely available.

Experts said the study should prompt countries to reconsider how they classify drugs. For example, last year in Britain, the government increased its penalties for the possession of marijuana. One of its senior advisers, David Nutt – the lead author on the Lancet study – was fired after he criticized the British decision.

“What governments decide is illegal is not always based on science,” said Mr. van den Brink. He said considerations about revenue and taxation, like those garnered from the alcohol and tobacco industries, may influence decisions about which substances to regulate or outlaw.

“Drugs that are legal cause at least as much damage, if not more, than drugs that are illicit,” he said.

via Alcohol the most lethal drug: study – The Globe and Mail.