Happiness lies within one’s self, and the way to dig it out is cocaine
Aleister Crowley
Welcome to Colombia!” Those were the jubilant words that greeted me as I entered the VIP room of a Bogota nightclub. Neatly divided lines of cocaine were laid out on the coffee table in front of the woman who had delivered the greeting. I had come to the Columbian capital to give a lecture at the 2018 Psychoactive Week forum, which had finished only a few hours earlier. This was the afterparty. It looked like a scene straight out of New Jack City or some other awful cautionary tale intended to warn young people against cocaine use and trafficking. But things aren’t always as they appear.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Rio de Janeiro.
In 2013, I met Julita Lemgruber, a sociologist from Rio, at the International Drug Policy Reform conference in Denver. She urged me to come to her country and give a series of lectures. She felt that my views on drugs and society, especially my belief that specific substances are scapegoated in order to avoid addressing complex social problems, would resonate with Brazilians.
I was flattered but had no idea if this was actually true or not. I knew almost nothing about Brazil and even less about its approach to drugs. I was also self-conscious about my inability to speak Portuguese. I had spent years remedying other early educational deficiencies, but the acquisition of other languages remained a glaring gap in my skill set. I didn’t want to subject myself to feeling like “the dumb-ass American” who couldn’t be bothered to learn a foreign language. I politely declined Julita’s invitation.
But Julita isn’t the sort of person who takes no for an answer. She is persistent, persuasive, and tough. Undoubtedly, these attributes contributed to her being selected as the first woman in charge of the state of Rio’s prison system back in the early 1990s and to being named the state’s first police ombudsman from 1999 to 2000. Julita doesn’t look the part in the traditional sense. She sports fashionable gear and rocks a stylish crimson pixie cut with straight bangs. But behind her youthful face lies decades of experience, disappointment, and wisdom.
Julita is her own person; she’s a fearless, independent thinker who’s unafraid to go where the evidence dictates. Julita’s perspective has continually evolved over the course of her long career working closely with law enforcement. She’s now convinced that draconian drug policies and racial discrimination are at the center of the crime and violence she has spent much of her life trying to stem. This belief fuels her unwavering efforts to push for less restrictive drug laws and for the meaningful inclusion of marginalized people into Brazilian society. The more I learned about Julita, the more difficult it became to say no.
So, in May 2014, there I was, in Rio, lounging at a luxury hotel that overlooked the famous Ipanema Beach. When Saturday rolled around, I was asked to take part in the local annual Marijuana March. But the march’s exclusive focus on cannabis, as if it and its users were higher on the pecking order of drugs, gave me pause. In the end though, I participated and walked the entire beach from one end to the other. I walked alongside Jean Wyllys,1 a local celebrity and politician who had introduced bills to legalize marijuana. Hundreds of others joined us. It was a community of kindness brought together by a desire to legalize adult recreational marijuana use. The vibe reminded me of Roy Ayers’s 1976 hit “Everybody Loves the Sunshine.” It was cool; it was festive, too. People openly sold, shared, and smoked weed. They also exchanged other things—food, drink, love, you name it, and it was permitted, or so it seemed.
Over the course of the day, I was told that all drugs had been decriminalized in Brazil since 2006. This surprised me. I assumed that Brazil blindly followed the United States when it came to drug policy. Wrong. According to Brazilian law, unlike U.S. law, anyone caught possessing substances in amounts consistent with personal use should not be subjected to incarceration. Instead, the person might receive a warning and be required to perform community service or attend a drug-education program or course. Those caught selling banned drugs, however, were still subjected to harsh criminal sanctions.
The morning after the Marijuana March, I met with Julita in a restaurant in Leblon, an upscale neighborhood near Ipanema Beach, to discuss the schedule of events she had prepared for me. It looked exhausting, daunting even. I was to travel across three states while giving multiple lectures and media interviews, making a number of site visits, and holding meetings with interested parties in each state—all in the course of about a week. I got tired simply looking at the itinerary. This was typical Julita—detail oriented, even if it kills her, and efficient, even if it kills you.
I was too embarrassed to express any apprehension I felt about the formidable task she’d laid out for me. I just had to grin and bear it.
I did, however, say something about what I had learned on the previous day at the march. I heaped praise on Brazilian lawmakers for passing such a progressive drug law. “My Deearrrr,” Julita said very slowly in a tender tone. “Oh shit,” I thought. I realized my mistake even before she opened her mouth. Praising politicians is a tricky endeavor because most will eventually disappoint you, especially when it comes to drug policy. But it was too late. The deed was done. Julita was now in the middle of telling me something of great importance, and there was no stopping her. Locking her kind but intense eyes firmly on mine, she recited Brazilian composer Antônio Carlos Jobim’s famous quip: “Brazil isn’t for beginners.”
My education on Brazil began at that moment. Julita spent the next thirty minutes schooling me, practically nonstop, on how drug policy really plays out in her country. It was certainly true that under the current law, personal drug use is not meant to be punished by incarceration, but it remains a criminal offense. So, in effect, the law is depenalization, not decriminalization. Equally important, the law does not quantify personal use. It does not define drug amounts in terms of how much is considered personal use versus how much is considered trafficking. This critical factor is determined first by street-level police officers, who decide who is arrested and who is not. Arrestees, regardless of the drug quantity they possess, are eventually tried in criminal court as drug sellers.
Sure, the judge can ultimately rule that the defendant is not a trafficker, after taking into account the amount of drug possessed, the person’s legal history, and other mitigating factors. But that ruling is almost never made, especially if the defendant is black and poor. Another less frequently discussed feature of the Brazilian drug law is that it increased the minimum amount of prison time for trafficking violations from three to five years.
To cut to the chase, Brazil’s supposedly progressive drug law has actually dramatically increased the number of individuals in jail for drug trafficking. For example, drug arrests now account for nearly one-third of all arrests, whereas in 2006, when the law was passed, drug arrests accounted for about 10 percent of arrests. Furthermore, evidence shows that most individuals convicted of drug trafficking are unarmed first-time offenders with small amounts of drugs. And judging from prison population demographics, African-Brazilians are bearing the brunt of these arrests. While they make up about half the general population, they account for 75 percent of prison inmates.2 The message seems to be that if you’re white, you’re a user. You can go home. But if you’re black, you’re a trafficker. You must go to jail. And you can remain there for several months without ever appearing before a judge.
“The law is only as good—or as fair—as those interpreting it,” Julita said, the frustration palpable in her voice. She told me to take a look around the restaurant. “How many black people do you see?” she asked. I was the only one. Toni Morrison’s extraordinary novel Paradise came to mind. In it, the author noted that paradise is “defined by who’s not there, by the people who are not allowed in.”3
In August 2015, I had an experience that made this point personal. By then, I had visited Brazil several times, and I had learned quite a bit about the ongoing discrimination against the poor, especially those defined as black Brazilians. It’s important for me to stress that my status as an Ivy League professor and scientist provided some protection against antiblack Brazilian racism. During this August visit, it was reported that I was denied access to one of São Paulo’s five-star hotels, where I was scheduled to deliver a lecture.4 Within twenty-four hours, the story went viral, inciting a public outcry of rage and embarrassment that a black man was denied entrance to a hotel because of his race. I received an outpouring of support. Hundreds of people sent their encouragement and apologies via social media and email. I couldn’t walk the streets of São Paulo without someone stopping me to express their sympathy and sadness for how I was treated by the hotel staff.
Fortunately, the story wasn’t true. I was never denied entry by the hotel staff. I was completely unaware of the extent of this drama until I read about it online. What I found particularly disturbing is this: the egregious racial discrimination that occurs daily in Brazilian society does not generate a fraction of the attention, sympathy, and guilt that this bogus event did.
Consider two blatant examples of racism that occurred that very same week. In one case, it was revealed in the press and confirmed by the government that the police had been removing groups of black boys from public buses in an effort to prevent these children from going to Ipanema and its surrounding beaches. None of the children were charged with a crime; nonetheless, the policy was justified as a crime-prevention strategy. A remarkably large segment of Rio’s residents support such racially discriminatory measures. I have yet to hear that any public officials apologized to these black boys for this mean-spirited and shameful policy.
Another case involved a protest in response to the August 14, 2015, massacre of nineteen people, almost all black, by a clandestine police squad said to have been avenging the deaths of two fellow officers. Unbeknownst to me, the protest took place a few blocks from my hotel on Friday, August 28, the same day I gave a lecture to a group of criminal lawyers. Sadly, at least four times as many people attended my lecture as took part in the protest.
Initially, I was puzzled by the tremendous amount of public interest in the alleged racial discrimination perpetuated against me. It’s now clear, however, that the press and public are far more comfortable focusing on individual acts of racial discrimination—especially when the victim is an American public figure—than on ongoing racial discrimination against voiceless ordinary citizens. There are countless examples of this phenomenon, in both Brazil and the United States.
The more time I spent in Brazil, the more parallels I saw with my own country. Some emerged with cruel clarity. In both countries, for example, the opinion makers and authorities—including politicians, journalists, law-enforcement personnel, and educators—are exquisitely adept at using drug-related issues to denigrate and subjugate black and poor people. Exaggerations of issues surrounding crack cocaine epitomize this phenomenon. The drug has been blamed for both countries’ most vexing social problems, ranging from high rates of black unemployment to inhumanity to criminality.
Politicians get away with simply scapegoating the drug du jour in order to avoid addressing the real problems people face: poor education, an insufficient number of jobs paying a living wage, affordable housing, racial discrimination, and a lack of basic public services, to name just a few. This isn’t news, however. Politicians know that it’s far more politically expedient to offer what looks like immediate solutions to trumped-up drug crises, such as hiring more cops, than it is to invest in appropriate social policies whose benefits may not be seen for several years after the election cycle.
Around 1985, crack became widely available in major U.S. cities. By the late 1980s, it was being blamed for everything from black unemployment to misrepresented high murder rates to crack babies. The problem with that line of argument is that per capita murder and unemployment rates were higher in 1980 and 1982, respectively, before the introduction of crack. We also now know that the whole crack-baby craze was wildly overstated.5
But why let facts derail a good story? The crack tale was going to be played out just as other drug scares before it had, no matter what the evidence said. By frightening the population about the dangers of a purportedly new drug, cultural moralists are provided with enticing opportunities to impose their views on society. The moralists “help” to delineate clear lines between good and evil—never mind that we know that people are neither entirely good nor entirely evil. The moralists promote an us-versus-them mentality—never mind that we know this causes dangerous tensions between groups.
I grew up in Miami in an all-black area with few economic opportunities. Outsiders characterized our neighborhood as lawless and particularly unsafe for nonblack people. As I mentioned earlier, the prevailing sentiment in the late 1980s was that crack dealers and addiction were the causes of all that ailed my hood. The same was said about many other black communities. Conventional wisdom held that the drug was so virulently addictive that users needed only one hit and they were hooked for life. In a widely read exposé about crack dealers, Barry Michael Cooper wrote in the progressive Village Voice that because of crack, “outlaw is the law.”6
Even I got duped. In fact, I decided to study neuroscience specifically because I wanted to cure crack addiction. I also low-key joined Nancy Reagan—and other cool-ass celebrities, such as Pee-wee Herman, who connected with young people—by promoting slogans that urged folks to “Just Say No” to drugs. And who wasn’t a fan of Keith Haring’s huge “Crack Is Wack” mural located in New York City off Second Avenue and 128th Street?
Frankly, I think the crack issue gave pedantic, pseudointellectual, conscious brothas, such as twenty-one-year-old me, a raison d’être—not to mention career prospects. I received mad praise, attaboy, for advising black youth to stay off drugs. It was affirming. It felt good, like I was doing something important. And although I didn’t possess the skills to verbalize this back then, I knew that potential white employers are far more comfortable hiring black men to police the behavior of other black men than hiring them to serve in other capacities. It’s not an accident that a substantial proportion of low-level security positions are occupied by brothas.
For politicians, crack was a wet dream. They used the issue to justify waging an even more intense war on drugs. Congress passed new laws claiming to protect “real” Americans from unsavory drugs, dealers, and doers. As I’ve mentioned, one law, the Anti–Drug Abuse Act of 1986, established penalties that were one hundred times harsher for crack infractions than for powder infractions. Another law, the Anti–Drug Abuse Act of 1988, even promised a “drug-free America” by 1995. This goal—spoiler alert—wasn’t achieved. But this didn’t deter Congress from markedly increasing the budgets of law enforcement year after year in the antidrugs effort. Predictably, the crack frenzy led to record numbers of people jailed for drug-law violations. It set in motion the era of mass incarceration. More than two million Americans will sleep behind bars tonight.
The discourse on crack was unabashedly racialized. The enforcement of federal crack laws is but one example of this deplorable practice. A whopping 85 percent of those sentenced for crack offenses were black, even though most users and dealers of the drug were, and are, white. Without a doubt, this type of racism has contributed to spine-chilling statistics, such as this one: despite making up only 6 percent of the general population, black males comprise nearly 40 percent of U.S. prisoners.
The race-and-pathology narrative in which crack was steeped permeated the media and popular culture, too. The 1991 film New Jack City is emblematic of this phenomenon. The film chronicles the rise and fall of Nino Brown, a fictitious black crack druglord portrayed by Wesley Snipes. According to the story, Nino was bright enough, charismatic enough, industrious enough, persuasive enough, and ruthless enough to take control of an entire NYC public-housing project so he could set up the most profitable crack business the city had ever seen. Shit, at the time, even I secretly wanted to be Nino.
New Jack got rave reviews. According to critic Roger Ebert, the film provided Americans with “a painful but true portrait of the impact of drugs [crack and powder cocaine] on this segment of the black community.”7 Right on, brotha Roger! You nailed it. New Jack confirmed my views about crack. Probably because, basically, the filmmakers just dramatized the sensational media reports I had read about the drug. So, naturally, Ebert’s words resonated with me: “We see how they’re [drugs are] sold, how they’re used, how they destroy, what they do to people.”
Years later, I realized we’d all been horribly wrong. We’d not just been wrong to have adopted those views on crack; we’d also been wrong—deplorably so—to have heedlessly dehumanized those who sold or used the drug. This allowed authorities to shift the focus away from a “war on drugs” to a “war on people.” To put it more bluntly, it was a war on my people. I still haven’t gotten over the profound regret I feel whenever I think about the ignorant, traitorous role I played in vilifying crack and the people who were targeted.
I hope my current work as an academic and scientist helps to set the record straight. I have given thousands of doses of crack to people as part of my research and have carefully studied their immediate and delayed responses without incident. Sure, the drug can, in rare cases, exacerbate preexisting cardiovascular problems. But, in general, its cardiovascular effects are comparable to those that occur when people regularly engage in intense exercise.
Contrary to popular belief, the effects produced by crack are predominantly positive. My research participants consistently report feelings of well-being and pleasure after taking the drug. Pleasure is a good thing, something that should be embraced. It feels weird that I am compelled to write the preceding sentence because the idea seems so obvious. But I know that there remain those who obstinately cling to the belief that crack-induced pleasure is so overwhelming that it drives most users to uncontrollable consumption. The data say otherwise. The addictive potential of crack—or the latest vilified drug—is not extraordinary. The fact is that nearly 80 percent of all illegal-drug users use drugs without problems such as addiction.8 In other words, we now know unequivocally that the effects of crack have been ridiculously exaggerated; crack is no more harmful than powder cocaine is. They are, in fact, the same drug.
I have published these and related findings in respected scientific journals as well as in popular outlets.9 I have given countless public lectures and media interviews dispelling myths about crack and drawing attention to this particularly somber fact: the egregious popular portrayals of crack have ruined more lives than the drug itself.
Our response to crack in the 1980s and 1990s weighed on me even more heavily in the summer of 2015 as I worked in a Geneva clinic, where people diagnosed with heroin addiction received multiple daily doses of the drug as part of their treatment. Sometimes, while I watched the patients obtain and inject their medicine in this comfortable and respectful environment, I couldn’t help but think about the contrast between the Swiss’s approach to heroin and our own to crack, or any banned drug for that matter.
One day while in the clinic, I received an email from someone named Tom Wright. He claimed to be the New Jack City writer. Cheekily, he asked something like, “Why are you dissing my movie?” Sometimes when I spoke publicly about cocaine, I’d mock the movie as unrealistic and harmful. But I didn’t think the filmmakers would have the nerve to step to me. “This must be a prank,” I thought. Nope, it wasn’t a joke. It was, indeed, the Tom Wright, Mr. New Jack himself.
After a few friendly emails, we set up a face-to-face meeting upon my return to the United States. We’d connect at the Columbia campus entrance on Broadway and 116th Street and then walk to a restaurant for lunch. As I strolled toward our meeting place, an anxiety-provoking thought ran across my mind: “Damn, how will I recognize Tom?” I’d never met him, and the Broadway entrance is always overrun with visitors. “Ah yeah,” a second sinking thought pushed out the first, “whites and Asians are the overwhelming majority of people entering the campus.” This meant that the New Jack writer would likely be easy to spot.
He wasn’t. Despite the fact that he stood only a few feet away, several minutes passed before I recognized him—in part, because I was trying to avoid getting waylaid by the flannel shirt–wearing, middle-aged white guy who had just waved at me. Perhaps he recognized me from TV or something. I couldn’t be sure. But I wasn’t going to make eye contact with him because it might’ve been perceived as an invitation to engage. Ignoring my uninviting demeanor, flannel-shirt guy introduced himself. It was Tom. I was expecting a black man, someone who dressed like Teddy Riley or the Cash Money Brothers. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Tom resembled a lumberjack far more than he did a new jack.
Later, we joked about my mistaken perception of him. He said it happens often, in part, because that’s the way New Jack City’s producers wanted it. When the movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival back in January 1991, Tom was asked to stay home. Apparently, it’s difficult to market an “authentic” film about black urbanites and crack if the screenwriter is white and from Idaho.
The folks at Warner Bros. were well aware of this image problem from the moment they acquired Tom’s story. To address it, they hired Barry Michael Cooper to massage the story line. Cooper, a black writer from New York City, certainly had more “street cred” than Tom did. In addition, Cooper had already written an influential article on crack titled “Kids Killing Kids: New Jack City Eats Its Young.”
Published in The Village Voice in December 1987, the lengthy essay detailed Detroit’s—but, oddly, not New York City’s—so-called crack epidemic. In the piece, Cooper introduced mainstream America to the term new jack: “a calculated novice who enjoys killing you, aside from making a name for himself.” Those he labeled as new jacks were not just the people in the crack game—which is bad enough—but also black youth in general. He lambasted my contemporaries for everything from their desire to have disposable income to the gear they wore to the rap music they listened to. Drawing heavily on sensationalism, he told a story that blamed young black Detroiters for much of the city’s chaos. As you might have guessed, given the times, Cooper called for tougher drug laws. They were especially needed, he claimed, because my peer group was uniquely “immune to the harsh punishment for drug trafficking.”
Americans from all walks of life fell hook, line, and sinker for this dehumanizing depiction of black youth. The producers of New Jack City couldn’t lose with Cooper on board as a storyteller. He reworked Tom’s original screenplay to more closely match his Village Voice article. He changed the drug of focus from heroin to crack. The screenplay title was also changed: The Godfather: Part III became New Jack City.
Why was the original version called The Godfather: Part III? Tom was initially hired by Paramount Pictures to write the final screenplay of The Godfather trilogy. But there was a problem: the star of Tom’s flick would be a black man. In the 1970s, the film’s backdrop, Nicky Barnes was one of the most prominent figures of the New York City underworld. So naturally he’d be featured in Tom’s screenplay, right? Wrong. There was no way the higher-ups at Paramount were going to make The Godfather film with a black person in a high-profile role. To make matters worse, Eddie Murphy, then Paramount’s box-office cash cow, really wanted to play the Barnes character. The top brass, however, feared that Murphy’s movie-star image would be tarnished, possibly irrevocably, if he portrayed a drug dealer. So rather than developing Tom’s original screenplay, Paramount allowed Tom to shop it to other studios, thereby killing two birds with one stone. Quincy Jones, then at Warner Bros., scooped it up, assembled a team, and the rest, as they say, is black history.
During our conversation, I got the feeling that Tom had had practically no editorial influence on what would become New Jack City. “Boy, are you lucky!” I thought as he continued. He had been shut out of the film’s promotional activities, which meant he was virtually anonymous. Few people associate his face with the film. That’s exactly how I’d like it if I were him. I certainly wouldn’t tout my role in creating anything that relies on extreme distortions to reinforce misguided notions that black youth are uniquely prone to descend into savagery.
Today, in the United States, crack is no longer considered the worst drug in the history of humankind. That distinction now—for the time being—belongs to opioids, but in a few years, you can bet it’ll belong to another drug. As for crack, many acknowledge that exaggerations about the drug drove us to adopt preposterous policies, which, among other things, contributed to the further marginalization of black people. In fact, on August 3, 2010, President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine from 100:1 to 18:1. This was an important acknowledgment of our past foolishness, but, to be clear, any sentencing disparity in this case makes no scientific sense.
And yet, despite the dreadful and lingering impact of U.S. crack policies, Brazil is pursuing a similar path some thirty years later. Many Brazilians have been convinced that “cracolândias” are one of their country’s most pressing problems.10 Supposedly, crack lands—the English translation—are places where “fiends” gather to smoke the drug, as well as engage in other behaviors that offend the dominant culture. (In the United States, we once called these places “crack houses.”) Located in urban slum areas, cracolândias are also reputed to be controlled by young druglords who use deception, coercion, and violence to “hook” users in order to guarantee loyal long-term customers. Some claim that cracolândias are a major source of African-Brazilians’ undoing. Sound familiar?
I know that most stories about crack don’t square with reality. That’s why one of the first places I visited in Brazil was a cracolândia. I was warned that these places are filled with unpredictable “zombies” driven primarily by their desire for another hit. “Barbaric” was the term used to describe them to me by one person who advised against my going. I got similar reactions about my plans to visit favelas, districts long abandoned by the government but home to many of the country’s poorest citizens. In favelas, the state often does not provide basic public services, such as medical care, sanitation, and transportation. The void is usually filled by community members themselves, evangelical churches, NGOs, and, yes, criminal organizations. Cracolândias and favelas share some important characteristics. Both are inhabited primarily by people on the margins of society who suffer from incendiary and inhumane perceptions constructed mostly by outsiders and who dwell in precarious conditions where misery, illegality, and violence predominate. Cracolândias are typically located in favelas.
A bumper sticker on the back of a police car caught my eye en route to my first visit to these areas. It read in Portuguese, Crack, É Possível Vencer (Crack, It’s Possible to Win). I dismissed it as just rhetorical drug-war propaganda, not thinking it was promoting an actual war. I was dead wrong. When we arrived at Complexo da Maré, one of Rio’s largest favelas, I saw an actual war zone. Armed forces were everywhere, an occupying force to the favela’s 140,000 residents.
The official story claimed that the military was needed to restore order and halt the violence caused by the crack trade. Crack was the enemy, and it would be defeated. Others say that this is a cover story, that the troops were deployed at Maré because of the upcoming 2016 Rio Olympics. Maré is located on the main highway leading to and from the city’s major airport. Officials worried that unsavory activities might’ve oozed out of the favela and into the global spotlight. Rather than risk potential embarrassment, the decision was made to bring in armed forces.
When I arrived at Maré for the first time in May 2014, I was taken aback by the imposing number of troops patrolling the favela. I’d never seen anything like it, and I had spent time in the military. But apparently, the army soldiers were also surprised by our presence there. I was with a group of bourgeois-looking white Brazilians. And we stood out like Europeans on a Kenyan safari, complete with wide-eyed wonder and high-performance cameras. Slightly annoyed, but definitively confused, the soldiers demanded to know why were we there. They had the power to turn us away, to make us leave. They knew all too well that most middle-class Brazilians avoid favelas like the plague, which meant, among other things, that the soldiers had carte blanche to carry out inhumane acts with impunity and without the prying eyes of the press.
I vaguely remember someone in our group telling the soldiers that I had come from the United States to speak with kids from favelas about staying off drugs. One of the armed men radioed this information to a superior who eventually allowed us to continue on our way.
The whole encounter was surreal, chilling even. We stood only a couple of meters away from a dozen or so heavily armed soldiers, seemingly adolescents. Many of them grew up and still live in the very same favelas they occupy. I thought back to the time when I was in the military, when I was their age, carrying a loaded automatic rifle. Like them, I did as I was directed. Thankfully, I was never ordered to subjugate my own community. I felt for the soldiers; they were just kids. I felt for the residents; hundreds are killed each year by men in uniform, mostly police.
In Brazil, it’s not always easy to tell the difference between the federal armed forces and the state police. Both routinely invade favelas. Regarding the state police, it’s important to understand that they comprise two types of forces: civil and military police. The civil police are responsible for criminal investigations, that is, detective work, forensics, and prosecutions. The military police, on the other hand, are organized like the federal armed forces. In fact, each member concurrently serves as a reservist in the Brazilian army and receives training in counterinsurgency. Military-police units are also equipped with armored vehicles and high-powered automatic assault rifles. These units’ sole charge is to maintain public order, which includes frequent occupation operations. The problem is that authorities sometimes deem routine life in favelas as “public disorder,” justifying, in their minds, an invasion. In Brazil, the military police are frequently used as an invading army against the country’s own poor citizens.
I went to several favelas and so-called crack lands. I indeed saw people smoking crack out of makeshift pipes and drinking alcohol out of plastic cups. I saw heated and animated discussions. But I mostly saw people talking, laughing, and tending lovingly to their children and pets. I saw people living life.
Mostly I saw the widespread abject poverty. A large number of people lived in shoddily constructed shacks, devoid of basic services and surrounded by piles of rubbish. It seemed that the authorities had not removed the trash in some of these communities for months. I grew up in a housing project and yet was still absolutely shocked and disturbed by these conditions. I tried not to show my dismay, because I was also grateful to be in the presence of such decent and generous people.
The residents were extremely warm and welcoming. So-called drug users and traffickers were eager to share with me. At my request, one person even gave me a crack rock to have tested for purity; sadly, I couldn’t find a testing site in the country. Some told stories of male relations being rounded up by the police for suspected drug trafficking, never to be seen alive again. Residents didn’t need to be told that problems such as widespread poverty, inferior education, high unemployment, and violence had plagued their communities long before 2005, when crack first appeared in Brazil.
This is borne out by the data. Brazil has been beset with high, usually double-digit, rates of unemployment since it became a democratic country in 1988. Unemployment peaked in the late 1990s at just under 15 percent. Brazil’s unemployment rate is usually more than twice as high as that of the United States’. Homicide rates in Brazil have been consistently among the highest in the world for several decades. Between 1990 and 2003, the countrywide rate increased from 22 to 29 per one hundred thousand residents. This increase was followed by a slight decline to 27 in 2011, only to peak at 31 in 2017. In 2018, the number dropped to 25, still five times higher than the murder rate in the United States.
The popular rhetoric is that drug gangs are largely responsible for the social instability and violence in Brazilian urban centers, such as Rio. Politicians often invoke this claim to justify the tanks and soldiers that have become commonplace in some favelas. Dressed in combat fatigues, the police are at war with the country’s poor and black citizens, a war fought in broad daylight, in a democratic society.
Heavily armed local militias have become a normal feature of favela life. Comprised mainly of off-duty and retired police officers, militias came about supposedly to protect favela residents from drug traffickers. In truth, they operate much like the criminal organizations they claim to keep in check. They clash with traffickers over control of lucrative regions. They extort money from residents and shopkeepers. And they sell drugs. In Rio, militias control almost half of the city’s nearly one thousand favelas. By comparison, drug traffickers control less than 40 percent.11
In 2018, police killed more than 6,100 people nationwide. That’s about six times the toll in the United States, whose population is larger than Brazil’s by 115 million people. Many of Brazil’s police killings amount to extrajudicial executions, just as in the Philippines. The São Paulo police ombudsman examined hundreds of police killings in 2017 and concluded that excessive force was used—sometimes against unarmed people—in three-fourths of the cases.
The largest proportion of police killings tends to occur in the state of Rio, which is also the home of the country’s notoriously callous president Jair Bolsonaro. From 2003 to 2018, on average, Rio police killed 930 citizens each year, 70 percent of African descent. In 2018, this number soared to 1,534; more than four people were killed daily at the hands of the police.12 Halfway through 2019, the average number of citizens killed by officers had climbed to more than five per day.
Many people, me included, see these police killings as a campaign of genocide. But not Bolsonaro and his supporters. Consistently, he makes public comments that demonstrate a blatant disregard for due process and that encourage police brutality. Suspects should be shot dead “in the streets like cockroaches,” he has said. It is no wonder that Jean Wyllys, a Brazilian politician, feared for his life and fled the country shortly after Bolsonaro was elected president. Wyllys was a noted Bolsonaro nemesis when they both served in the Brazilian congress.
Bolsonaro’s barbarism might be surpassed by that of Wilson Witzel, governor of Rio. A former judge, Witzel is known for urging the police to “aim at their little heads and fire!” when dealing with suspects.13 With these types of leaders, an end to the country’s long history of social instability and violence against specific groups does not appear to be anywhere in sight.
Despite the complex mix of factors that contribute to the country’s pressing problems, too many Brazilians aim to address them by starting first with crack users and drug traffickers. Like U.S. officials more than thirty years ago, Brazilian authorities feel justified slaughtering poor brown and black people so long as it’s in pursuit of “public security.” This means, among other things, eradicating crack users and dealers, whatever the collateral damage. The familiar script—frighten the public about the violent unpredictability of crack users and traffickers—allows authorities to divert attention away from legitimate concerns and increase the budgets of law enforcement and “treatment” providers.
In 2014, the country allocated R$4 billion in this effort. Public awareness and education campaigns are included, although what parades as education cannot be considered informative. Drug education amounts to telling people not to take illegal drugs. In Brazil, drug treatment primarily consists in mandating users to facilities run by evangelical Christian organizations, where the focus is on prayer and manual labor. By any modern standard of medicine, this can hardly be considered treatment, let alone effective treatment. The bulk of the funds and focus of Brazil’s crack efforts is geared toward law enforcement, just as is the case in the United States.
This will undoubtedly lead to more African-Brazilian deaths and push these folks further to the margins of society. African-Brazilians make up about 50 percent of the population but represent less than 5 percent of elected officials and are virtually nonexistent in middle-class positions.
So what should be done in Brazil? That’s a complicated question, with answers way beyond the scope of this book. But meaningful efforts to increase educational and economic equity would go a long way. Another solution would be to dispense with the scapegoating of crack, or any form of cocaine. Anyone who believes that crack—or any drug, for that matter—is the major problem faced by marginalized people is either dishonest or naive, or both. If anything, cocaine provides some respite from the suffering among the poor and from the cognitive dissonance experienced by conscientious, well-to-do white Brazilians, who know that what is happening in their country is obscene.
Back in Bogota, I sat at the cocaine-filled table, half listening to the chemist who was demonstrating how to distinguish between high- and low-purity cocaine. Each line contained varying percentages of the drug, ranging from about 20 to 90. He knew this because earlier he’d analyzed the samples in preparation for the demonstration. I remember this gentle hombre referring to cocaine as “sunshine to brighten up your day.” I also vaguely recall him saying that you can get a pretty good estimate of purity by checking the wetness of the substance. The wetter the cocaine, the better the quality. At least, that’s what I think he said.
Honestly, I found it difficult to pay attention. My mind had drifted to Brazil and its hypocrisy about cocaine. I fixated on the “Helicoca Incident,” when on November 24, 2013, the Brazilian federal police seized a helicopter filled with a half a ton of cocaine. The helicopter belonged to a company owned by the family of Brazilian senator Zezé Perrella. At the time, his son Gustavo was a representative for the state of Minas Gerais. Gustavo used part of his government allowances to fuel the helicopter and employed the pilot as a personal assistant. Despite these connections, neither of the Perrellas were prosecuted. The pilot took the hit and was convicted of drug trafficking. He got a ten-year bid; the Perrellas got their helicopter back.
A similar incident occurred in June 2019, when a member of President Bolsonaro’s military detail was caught with 39 kg of cocaine on the way to the G20 submit in Japan. During a stopover in Seville, Spanish authorities found the drug in the handbag of Silva Rodrigues, an airman in the Brazilian air force. Bolsonaro was traveling on a separate plane that did not land in Seville. He said in a statement, “If the airman is found to have committed a crime, he will be tried and convicted according to the law.” Rodrigues was the only person arrested and remains behind bars in Spain. It looks as if he’s the fall guy in this case.
Thinking about the large numbers of poor and black Brazilians jailed and killed each year in anticocaine efforts overseen by depraved individuals—who, by the way, enjoy the drug as much as the next guy—made me feel hopeless, even complicit. How was I any different from liberal white Brazilians who secretly use their cocaine—and other drugs—without publicly aligning themselves with condemned drug users?
“How about a li’l sunshine?” the chemist asked, observing that my mind was elsewhere. His question drew me back into the room and provoked one of my own: “What kind of guest rejects such hospitality?” Certainly not me. My mother had raised me better, raised me to have manners. After the cocaine gently caressed my nose and the effects were apparent, I heard Bill Withers singing in my head: “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone.” Perhaps we’d love each other better if we had more sunshine in our lives. We have a long way to go.