Brazilian health officials say an epidemic is taking hold — an outbreak of crack cocaine use nationwide, from the major cities on the coast to places deep in the Amazon.
It's an image at odds with the one Brazil wants to project as the country prepares to host soccer's World Cup in 2014 and the Summer Olympics two years later. But the problem has become too big to ignore.
The Luz district of central Sao Paulo was once grand, with its old train station and opulent buildings. Now, this neighborhood is known as Cracolandia — Crackland.
On a recent night, skeletal figures in tattered, dirty clothes emerge — mostly men, but some women. They're glassy eyed and jumpy, and looking for a quick fix, oblivious to the police helicopters overhead.
Brazil is dealing with what officials call a crack epidemic, affecting Brazilians of all ages and confounding government efforts to deal with it. Almost a year after a high-profile police effort to clean up Sao Paulo's cracolandia as part of a revitalization program for the historic center, the outposts remain, but in a number of shifting locations rather than one large one.
"I've seen no improvements and some things are getting worse," said William Damiao Quirino, who has been working as a doorman and security guard downtown for six years. "Trying to clean up this or that corner isn't working. The only thing I think can work is a concerted community effort, involving residents too, to try to get these people treatment."
Origins Of The Problem
Crack has been in Brazil since the 1990s, but its use exploded in the past six years, according to health and police officials. The reasons, they say, are proximity and porosity.
Brazil is a neighbor to the world's biggest cocaine-producing countries, and its borders are vast, remote and largely unguarded.
Eloisa Arruda, the secretary of justice for Sao Paulo state, says the market is alluring.
"Brazil offers a big market of cocaine and crack consumers," says Arruda. "And that's partly because people have more buying power."
She says the problem is similar to the crack crisis in the United States in the 1980s, when the drug engulfed cities and generated waves of violence.
"It's a big growth of people using crack in public," Arruda says. "People permanently in the street consuming drugs day and night."
The Brazilian approach has been to treat the problem as a health care crisis.
President Dilma Rousseff responded with a $2 billion drug prevention and treatment program.
In Sao Paulo, addicts are urged to seek help at Psychosocial Attention Centers — 80 clinics where addicts can receive a bed for the night.
