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Illegal Markets, Violence, and Inequality pp 37–66Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Crack: Micromechanics of a Dysfunctional Illegal Market

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Abstract

Recife’s crack market is intensely competitive, particularly at the retail level. The challenges involved in governing the market in that context are made worse by heavy police disruption of the trade. In addition, the high prevalence of compulsive and dependent use makes debt and petty crime common among poor users. The tensions and conflict that result often turn violent as assaults and homicides among “traffickers” are rarely punished by authorities. Policing complicates the tricky governance of the crack market and fails to deter the violence that results from its breakdown. Unsurprisingly, much of Recife’s drug violence is tied to the crack trade.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Rio de Janeiro-based Fiocruz is Brazil’s most important public health research centre.

  2. 2.

    “The expression covers cocaine base, ’merla’ and ’oxi’—as well as crack, whether they are smoked in pipes, cans or cups, or using similar instruments.” [Translated by the authors from the Portuguese original: Bastos and Bertoni 2014: 133.] “According to a journalistic report, Merla is a very adulterated form of cocaine base and oxi—from ‘oxidado’,” not OxyContin—is similar to crack but prepared with different reactive agents (Viana 2005).

  3. 3.

    About noia, see Biondi (2016: 47 and 169, note 23) as well as Heckenberger study of São Paulo crack use (2013). Radamés Andrade Viera’s informants also emphasize the tension and paranoia characteristics of those smoking sessions (2010: 112).

  4. 4.

    R$880 per month (as per January 1, 2016), 13 months, with an exchange rate of 4 Reais for 1 US$.

  5. 5.

    Several government informants have told us that the typical rock weighted .25 grs, but we rely here on the study done by Antonio Gomes de Castro Neto (2016), who has analysed thousands of samples seized by the police between 2001 and 2011. As a precaution, however, our calculation of the range of profit margins will use the amounts generated by those larger rocks.

  6. 6.

    It is plausible that cocaine base would also be given in consignment to cooks by bulk dealers, but we were not able to confirm that information.

  7. 7.

    When we did our interviews, between September 2015 and the end of May 2016

  8. 8.

    The period during which we collected our data was extremely troubled in Brazil , with the impeachment of the president and a brutal recession, which caused exchange rates to vary wildly. For the purpose of this estimate, we use an exchange rate of $R3.33 for US$1.00.

  9. 9.

    In their study of Belo Horizonte’s crack market and while framing their analysis in the terms of network theory, Sapori et al. (2012) make a very similar argument when they identify the “openness ” of boca-level networks as a key reason for much higher levels of violence than among the closed network of entrepreneurs that control the bulk market (pp. 76–78).

  10. 10.

    In May 2012, according to Madrid’s El País, the FARC—Colombia’s main guerrilla force—hired a Bogotá-based Oficina de cobro to kill Fernando Londoño Hoyos, who had served as Minister of Interior and Justice in Alvaro Uribe’s cabinet. http://www.elpais.com.co/elpais/judicial/noticias/conozca-como-funcionan-oficinas-cobro-y-su-vinculo-con-farc (accessed 2016 02 18).

  11. 11.

    An informant described a scene in which a desperate user was given a handgun by a boca owner and told, in exchange for the promise of a few rocks, to quickly find a cellphone.

  12. 12.

    “Poor ability” should be understood here as deriving both from the set of skills of those individuals and from the exclusionary character of the labour market .

  13. 13.

    However liberal one may be about sexual work and the extent to which it should be seen as a legitimate activity, situations in which individuals, often minors of age, charge U$1.25 (R$5.00) or a fraction of a crack rock for a sex act (interviews) to sustain drug use, are difficult to see as anything but extreme forms of exploitation and violence.

  14. 14.

    Reinarman et al. (1997).

  15. 15.

    Wealthier users don’t need this kind of insurance as, for them, the cost of the drug itself is not an issue: most—though not all—accounts of middle-class crack smoking sessions that we were given describe individuals alone in a room, a motel, or a small house and whose social interactions were limited to accessing drugs and receiving sexual services, as well as some food or drinks.

  16. 16.

    As discussed in the next chapter, beginning in 2012–13, the original focus on homicides was diluted—to give much more importance to drug seizures —and investments in policing have not been sustained.

  17. 17.

    It is little wonder that the notion of “lethality rate ,” which measures the ratio of dead to injured victims from police actions, was invented by Ignácio Cano , a Brazilian sociologist.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Jean Daudelin

  2. Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil

    José Luiz Ratton

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Daudelin, J., Ratton, J.L. (2018). Crack: Micromechanics of a Dysfunctional Illegal Market. In: Illegal Markets, Violence, and Inequality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76249-4_3

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