Cocaine poisoned in Argentina: three people returned to use after being discharged

drug trafficking and consumption in Argentina was crudely exposed by a massive intoxication with adulterated cocaine that caused at least 22 deaths in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, an emergency that the authorities considered this Thursday “controlled”.

“It would have been a greater tragedy” if it had not been confiscated “a great quantity” of cocaine apparently mixed with an opioid, said the chief of staff of the province of Buenos Aires (the most populous in the country), Pablo Bianco.

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The provincial Minister of Health, Nicolás Kreplak, said that the stalls selling the drug were dismantled and “20,000 doses were confiscated.”

A spokesman for the Buenos Aires Ministry of Security told AFP that the product caused 22 deaths. In addition, 20 patients remain with assisted breathing. More than 80 people were admitted in the last 24 hours, in hospitals in the west and north of Greater Buenos Aires.

The ringleader and two other members of the gang of traffickers from the outlying town of San Martín that distributed the cocaine were arrested in the early hours of Thursday.

The Buenos Aires Security Minister, Sergio Berni, rejected that “a drug war” is the cause of the adulteration.

Instead, he attributed it to inexperience in handling chemicals. “No one plots against their own business,” he maintained.

The cocaine was distributed since Tuesday night in the Villa Puerta 8 settlement in the municipality of Tres de Febrero, 40 kilometers from the capital.

Some consumers died of sudden cardiac arrest and several in their own homes.

“I hope for a miracle,” said an anguished Beatriz Mercado at the hospital where she took her 31-year-old son as soon as she found him lying in the kitchen of her house. “He was barely breathing,” Mercado said, exclaiming, “Let’s do something.”

The Buenos Aires Ministry of Health had to issue an unprecedented “epidemiological alert” on Wednesday and asked consumers to discard recently acquired substances as a precaution.

They went back to consuming

“We have had three cases of people discharged with intoxication, who this Thursday returned (to be hospitalized) because they consumed again,” Kreplak told the TN channel.

The lethal substance is still under analysis, but Berni anticipated that it contains an opioid because many intoxicated people reacted positively to medical treatment for these cases of consumer abuse.

The Security Minister, Aníbal Fernández, maintained that the problem of illegal drug trafficking and consumption in Greater Buenos Aires, with its 10 million inhabitants, “is as serious as it always was, with the aggravating circumstance of overproduction and oversupply” of substances. low cost and quality.

According to Berni, in the City of Buenos Aires and the province of Buenos Aires, which concentrate 40% of the Argentine population, “There is a sale of 250,000 doses of cocaine every day (…) it is the floor of what is calculated.”

Argentina joined international drug trafficking routes in the 1970s. Already in the mid-1980s, half a ton of cocaine was seized a year and a decade later, four times more, according to official records.

In 2020, in a pandemic, the consumption of illegal drugs fell and 2.7 tons of cocaine and 198 tons of marijuana were seized. In 2017, a record 12.1 tons of cocaine had been seized.

Rosario, 300 km north of Buenos Aires, the third most populous city in the country, has suffered drug violence for more than 20 years. Last year, the city recorded 231 homicides and dozens of shootings at public places for extortion purposes, according to municipal sources.

poverty and drugs

Greater Buenos Aires registers 45.3% of poverty and 10.1% of unemployment, according to the Institute of Statistics.

Villa Puerta 8, where the adulterated cocaine was sold, is a neighborhood of 170 precarious houses where many young people engage in drug dealing, local residents told the press.

But “drugs have no social status: the rich, the poor, the middle class, the professionals. It’s no use making prisons, let’s make rehabilitation centers,” said Beatriz Mercado, mother of a hospitalized patient in serious condition.

Blanca, the mother of one of the internees, declared in front of the hospital that the State did not offer her alternatives to private treatment for addicts at a cost of 60,000 pesos per month (300 dollars at the parallel exchange rate).

Sociologist Alberto Calabrese, an addiction expert, told AFP that the underreporting of illegal drug use in the country “is very large” and that “in conditions of poverty and lack of horizons, it is very likely that consumption of what be”.

“You don’t have to put the problem in terms of poverty exclusively, because it’s wrong, it crosses society, with legal and illegal drugs. People feel that they are no longer transgressing,” Calabrese said.

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Source: Elcomercio

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