Inside Brazil’s toxic drug culture
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/05/201151795043176476.html
Just after sunset, two skinny young men in their twenties sit in shadowy corner of a park in Rio Branco – located in the state of Acre, Brazil. They have a cigarette lighter, hand made pipes, and a small, yellowish-white coloured rock.
They ask that their full names not be used, and their identities be protected.
One of the young men – using the pseudonym ”Joao” - gently places the rock on the aluminum foil that covers one end of the pipe, making sure it doesn’t drop on the grass and get lost in the dark.
Looking at the rock, Joao mumbles: “This is to make my mind go to sleep.”
Then he ignites the lighter, puts the pipe to his lips, and slowly burns the rock whilst inhaling deeply.
He passes the lighter to his friend sitting next to him, who repeats the process himself.
“It’s so good,” Joao says, trying to hold the smoke in his lungs as long as he can. “The pleasure of this drug is at this very moment. When you inhale, it’s the first five seconds that is the ecstasy of this drug, when it comes to your brain. You feel your ear making a buzzing sound. You forget everything. The only thing in my head right now is the sensation of the drug.”
It’s one of the most destructive new drugs hitting Brazil – called “Oxi” on the streets – and has its origins here in the Amazon region. It is cheap, powerful and lethal. So lethal, in fact, that odds are both these two young men, if they continue to smoke it, will be dead within a year.
On the surface, Oxi is not a particularly unique drug. It is a derivative of cocaine paste, the clay-like foundation product used to make crack and refined powder cocaine. To make Oxi, chunks of freebase cocaine are soaked in gasoline. When gasoline is not available, kerosene is sometimes used. It is then mixed with limestone powder, a product used in construction. Easily attainable household solvents, like cleaning chemicals, are also sometimes added to the toxic mixture. In the final process, the rocks are dried, often simply under the sun, and then sold on the streets for consumption.
According to police, with cocaine paste as the main ingredient, Oxi can be made very easily and cheaply without the need for a background in chemistry – unlike refined powder cocaine, which needs the infrastructure of a laboratory to produce, and is much more time-consuming and complicated.
“The process [to make Oxi] can be done anywhere, by anyone,” Marcelo Moscardi, head of the Federal Police office in Rio Branco, Brazil, told Al Jazeera. “It’s a very simple process.”
The end result is that Oxi is considered almost twice as powerful as crack or cocaine.
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“chunks of freebase cocaine are soaked in gasoline”
um..i dont mind the odd dabble in some weed..but this looks like a recipe for a brain lobotomy..
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