Abstract
Recife’s drug markets are heavily segregated. Middle-class consumers and sellers rarely mix with poor ones. Consumption of high-quality cannabis, LSD, ecstasy, and cocaine hydrochloride is quite high among artists and intellectuals, the social movement crowd, “cool” baby boomers who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as middle-class upper high-school and university students. Markets for those drugs are active and profitable. Remarkably, given its exceptionally violent surroundings, Recife’s middle-class drug trade is largely devoid of violent confrontations or even of tensions. The paradox appears to lie in those markets’ closed and covert nature, combined with the limited extent of problematic consumption and a policing that heavily sanctions violence but leaves trafficking largely undisturbed.
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Notes
- 1.
The INPAD numbers for crack, by contrast, appear to significantly underestimate consumption levels. A focused study published in 2014 by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a governmental health research institute, concluded that 1.29% of the adult population of the Northeast smoked crack “regularly,” that is for at least 25 days in the six months preceding data collection (Bastos and Bertoni 2014: 131), which suggests a level of adult life use much higher than 1.6% in 2012. As crack consumption does not appear to be significant among middle-class users (interviews; Bastos and Bertoni 2014); however, this problem has no bearing on the analysis presented in this chapter.
- 2.
The expression comes from “boca de fumo,” or “smoke vent,” the name traditionally given to cannabis distribution points all over Brazil. Over the years, the “fumo” (“smoke”) part of their name has been dropped, perhaps because the range of products that they sell has expanded.
- 3.
There was no way for us to assess the chemical composition of what our informants were referring to. We simply reproduce the designation used on the market. The acronyms refer to the presumed composition of the products: lysergic acid (LSD) ; 25I-2-(4-iodo-2,5-dimethoxyphenyl)-N-[(2-methoxyphenyl)methyl]ethanamine (NBOMe); 2,5-dimethoxy-4-bromophenethylamine (2CB); dimethoxybromoamphetamine (DOB).
- 4.
Loló and lança-perfume are increasingly used indifferently to designate the cheaper product.
- 5.
Or about $200 per ounce for medium-quality cannabis, according to the crowd-sourced Price of Weed index, http://www.priceofweed.com/?mloc=1 (accessed 2018 02 25).
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Daudelin, J., Ratton, J.L. (2018). Islands of Peace: Middle-Class Drug Markets. In: Illegal Markets, Violence, and Inequality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76249-4_2
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