Junkies fill Medellin as exports blocked

Medellin – Three decades after cartel boss Pablo Escobar was shot dead by police on a rooftop in Medellin, the very city he had sought to uplift with drug money is being ravaged by it.

Junkies frequent hundreds of sales points dotted around Colombia’s second city, which has become the epicentre of the domestic drug trade.

“In Medellin you can find it anywhere. Even on the floor you find drugs,” Manue Morales, an out-ofwork engineer and chronic user of “basuco” – the cheapest drug on the market – said.

Basuco is derived from the coca leaf also used to make cocaine, and mixed with other low-grade substances. His hands shaking, 32-year-old Morales inhaled a dose in a public park, using a pipe fashioned from a PVC tube, even as pedestrians and police milled around. “The truth is that one is less cautious and [the basuco] can cause you to do stupid things,” said Morales, who lost his job due to drug use.

Four brief months later, all his worldly belongings fit into a worn briefcase and he often sleeps rough. Morales’s downfall, he said, started at a so-called “vice plaza” – drug vending points that numbered about 160 in Medellin 10 years ago, according to police. Researchers estimate the figure is now closer to 800.

In 2013, about 3.5% of Colombians said they had ever taken an illegal substance, according to the state statistics agency. By 2019, the number had almost tripled to 9.7%.

With aid from the United States, leader in the global “war on drugs”, a Colombian crackdown since the early 2000s has forced traffickers to look homeward. “A concentration of product was generated... that could not be exported due to this strong antidrug policy,” said toxicologist Juan Carlos Sanchez.

Domestic clients, however, are not getting the best of what the world’s largest cocaine exporter has to offer. Instead, they are getting hooked on cheaper, low-quality and often dangerous drugs.

With 2.2 million inhabitants, Medellin is today the city with the highest drug consumption – 15.5% – in Colombia. The Medellin city council estimates that each drug “plaza” can make up to $75 000 (about R1.2 million) a month – the equivalent of about 300 minimum salary earners.

But authorities say the increase in domestic drug use has gone hand-in-hand with rising insecurity. Since 2018, more than 2 500 people have been killed in gang wars nationally, police general Herman Bustamante said.

Official data does not distinguish between gangster and civilian deaths. In Medellin, the numbers reveal a paradox. In 1992, at the height of the search for Escobar, the city’s homicide rate was 350 per 100 000. Last year it was down to 15.5, even as drug use has surged.

According to Luis Fernando Quijano of social development NGO Corpades, this was more telling of a “mafia peace” than of any real progress. There were “pacts”, he said, between narco gangs and local authorities to allow drug trade in exchange for relative security in their areas.