Aspects of Vancouver’s crack scene resemble those of Brazil

Vancouver and two of Brazil’s large coastal cities have something in common, and it’s not bikinis on their beaches—it’s crack addicts.

A new study by an SFU professor calls for urgent intervention measures for Brazilian crack users. The paper, published in the International Journal of Drug Policy in April this year by health sciences professor Benedikt Fischer, describes the health and socioeconomic characteristics of crack users from two Brazilian cities: Salvador and Rio de Janeiro.

With one million crack users, Brazil has the dubious distinction of having the largest crack market in the world, according to the Federal University of São Paulo’s National Institute of Public Policies for Alcohol and Other Drugs.

Fischer—who is a visiting professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and who collaborated with Brazilian researchers for his report, which was largely funded by that country’s ministry of health—studied 160 crack users in the two cities. The majority of the users were young men between the ages of 18 and 24, came from marginalized sections of society, and often dealt with associated health problems, including sexually transmitted diseases.

These addicts usually concentrate in neighborhoods where there is easy access to the drug. The sex trade, as well as violence, is pervasive in such areas, much like Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Fischer’s paper notes that the crack situation “is described by many as an epidemic and subject to extensive social and political debate” in Brazil.

In a phone interview, Fischer said that current treatment of this epidemic is unsuccessful: he says the Brazilian government has no clear mandate on the best form of treatment or the best interventions to be made.

According to Dr. Thomas Kerr, codirector of the Addiction and Urban Health Research Initiative at the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, some aspects of Vancouver’s crack scene resemble those of Brazil. In Vancouver, as in Brazil, “many social factors, including poverty, lead to…crack and other drug uses, besides other factors such as childhood abuse.” As well, although the overall number of crack users here is smaller, it has increased in recent years.

In October 2009, the B.C. Centre of Excellence in HIV/AIDS published a study that noted that “among adult injection drug users, the rate of daily injection cocaine use decreased dramatically from a high of 38.1% in 1996 to 8.5% in 2007. This decrease has been accompanied by a large increase in the use of crack cocaine smoking, with 3.5% of study participants reporting daily crack cocaine smoking in the last six months in 1996 compared with 41.7% reporting such behavior in 2007.”

In addition, according to a recent survey from the Centre for Addictions Research of B.C., the percentage of street-involved Vancouver adults who used crack in the week before being surveyed increased from 70 percent in the first half of 2008 to 84 percent in the second half of 2012.

Kerr, who is also an associate professor in UBC’s department of medicine, said in a phone interview he believes that some countries don’t address the drug’s problem effectively: “The United States, for example, has spend billion of dollars with drug law enforcement, which has made the problem even worse with levels of use increasing and price of drugs going down.

“Canada has implemented things like mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, which is an embarrassment for our government since they have experienced from USA that these are not only ineffective but they perpetuate harms and are extremely costly to fund.”

Kerr added that many Latin American countries have realized that drug-law enforcement doesn’t work, and they are starting to focus on demand reduction. The state government of Sao Paulo, Brazil, for example, announced on May 9 the creation of what some call the “crack cheque”. This program will provide the equivalent of C$677 monthly to addicts’ families to defray the cost of six months of addiction treatment in registered clinics.