Chronicle of drug users in Ciudad Juarez
With a high rate of HIV infections Intravenous, Ciudad Juárez, along with other border cities, concentrated most injecting drug users. The few prevention efforts among this population was made to counter the criminalization of drug use. A chronicle describes the visit to some stables in the city and in a story follows the work of the organization Partners, a pioneer in the implementation of needle exchange programs for use with less damage.
West of Ciudad Juárez has always been squat houses and adobe. Facade after facade, all covered by a fine powder which way the wind accumulates sand dunes in the corners. The location is unclear, Aldama and Abasolo colony or Carmen Alto district, namely what is the correct name. By early afternoon there are few people on the street, another boy carrying a giant bottle of Coke, some Texas boys wear a cap or sun protection. The car runs through a concrete channel that despite the first impression is one avenue: the viaduct Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, that just serves as a drain in the rainy season, the few weeks of storms that flooded everything. We're here.
The greatness of pleasure is the elimination of pain
A house, almost in a corner, concrete facade and no windows. A door blocked by wooden planks that reveals a narrow aisle. At the first door on the left: a dark room, tiny lobby where four men are regarded. They are sitting on the floor, or in some old wooden chair. They look in silence. On one side of a cloth covering the door of a darkened room.
After some talk with them comes a man up and down looking at us like we are outsiders. It is the "keeper" of riding asking us what we want. He explained that the brigade is harm reduction of the civil organization Companions who comes to making the exchange of syringes, as ever, and accompanying a reporter. The man changes his attitude:
- Let me introduce them ... This is where they come together, here's where their friends and cross all the city to come to where your buddies, and also that this is a family, security.
- What is known more for anything, or can anyone join?
- anyone can come here to heal, but no infection.
- How do you know of infections?
- Well, you see them right away. Above all, here, as I say, come pure family.
- How many guys come here?
- No, they do make more, thousands of people, everywhere. Thieves, thieves do not, everything. Come to yours. Nothing more you heal, you're about two, three minutes, and go. Here you are not charged anything to anyone, if you like, then give heart to the soda.
(Leaving me explain, for the low, the open secret: the "charge" up for the free services with the sale of heroin and cocaine required by users.)
While speaking, visitors enter and leave the darkened room. Go back and forth to heal, a word literally expresses the sense of injecting heroin. A young thin, bare belly and large breast implants stops with us, find something, and bring as a syringe and looks nervous. Finally discover what you need: a cigarette butt collected from the ground and blowing for cleaning, while on the fourth behind the curtain. One of the activists takes the butt while giving you a tiny tuft of cotton. She smiles in thanks.
- And the police?
- You know one of the stakes, that is, the cops already know, then you ask "then you jump?, and if you tell a lie it gives them more courage, though some officers give us Viader. But better if we see a cop we turn around. "Speak other users, too skinny, with sunken eyes and baseball cap.
- But what if the cop cache and what makes them?
- you take the boat and it depends how you look, if you look good on, or very bad, you get fewer hours, on the side you can not stand the wrapper, then many times as it is a sick truth addict, many times you start to kill or hang in the same quadrille that brings, then many times only give you eight or 12 hours pa which leave.
The quadrille is a withdrawal syndrome, pain, indicating that it is time to heal, drop-injection-again.
- How does it feel with the quadrille? "Asked a man aged 53, who lives in a tiny room that doubles as a ring.
- Many things. Sneezing, anxiety, chills, bone pain, poor appetite, it releases one of the stomach. And with the current rise time.
- How do you feel when injected?
- Welfare. Pretend medicine. So you can sleep.
Where there is pleasure no pain or sorrow
is a small house, looking like the other. A large window covered by a thick curtain and a closed gate with a chain. Inside are two rooms. The first is a bed that occupies half the room. It is a mattress on plastic crates in groups. On one side there is a chair, across a small toilet. Faced with another sofa bed and a cabinet shelves adorned with stuffed animals chamagosos. In front there is a cabinet with the attachments for the drug. Empty cans of coke packed down, a toy cup with water, some small boats with bleach and water.
one of the chairs in an obese woman eating a chicken leg in broth, it helps with a tortilla. On one side, sitting in bed, a woman is thin and gaunt, haggard and blackened teeth. On the couch in front is a tanned man, also emaciated, with a sweatshirt that looks very comfortable and lets poke the edges of some tattoos on his neck. They are brothers. The other room, behind a curtain, leaving a third man. Younger, not so thin and emaciated. He is handsome, tall, sunburned white, blue-eyed stare. It is the third brother, a heroin addict and the other two. The obese woman is the mother of three, who came to see them in Torreon.
- I no longer know what to do with them. Just saw, this, the smallest, had already left. I was about four years that was clean, since she got married. Now ask, left his wife with two children and pregnant back in Torreon.
The aforementioned listens and nods. Used heroin since she was 19 years-now 26 - and has six months fell after four years of abstinence. He decided to come to Juárez with his two brothers. The sister has about 30 years and 15 to use drugs, recently widowed six months ago. Her husband, who also injected heroin, "suddenly became ill." The back room
out another young woman, thin, toothless and poorly made two braids that almost reach the waist. Account that has a child living with his mother, while she spends seasons at home and others here, with her husband, also a drug user.
While two men talked, they come to cut up, want to go to the back room, but we ask you to do there, in front of us. "All right, is cool," they reply.
anxious are noted. They shake hands when preparing the dose. One type, a black top, pulls out a tiny foil wrapper. Inside, amid a strip of plastic is a black putty placed over the bottom of the can of Coke. Cocaine out another package. Puts a little - "is called coffee, "he informs the other, an expert in cocktails," put water and stir. Then drop a cotton-that allows the fluid to leak any impurities that may cause the syringe is clogged.
The girl with the braids long prepared the syringe with one hand and a master despite the faltering pulse. Meanwhile, the man, her husband, she pressed his arm a little above the wrist so that you skip the vein. The other guy kitchen, under the flame of a lighter, before preparing your dose injection.
The woman tries to inject his man three times, but gives to the vein. When he does, plays with the syringe, brings out a little blood, the returns, again to draw viewers, among gun a little debate about the pleasure generated by the action of pumping blood into the syringe. Voices for and against. Finally empty the syringe. The guy makes a face at all, gets up and takes a piece of paper to wipe the blood from the small wound on his arm full of marks.
sores, calluses and scars. Stigmata of intravenous drug user. In the first riding visited, a user shows the result of multiple injections on the same point. On his shoulder a deep hole, an abscess of an inch in diameter, drainage, red.
- Hey, where do you inject? I ask the man of 53 years, surprise at the absence of visible scars on his arms.
- I interspersed in the arms and feet, because that's beating by corns everywhere is not good. One has a lot of veins, only a matter of looking for him, because if not one the body rots. I've always had this concept of security with the body. As I say, this is a disease and one has to seek the remedy, but as the disease is illegal, not everyone can tell.
"The limit to the greatness of the pleasures is the removal of all pain. Where there is pleasure for the duration, there is neither pain nor sorrow, nor the mixture of both, "wrote the Greek philosopher Epicurus in the second century before the Christian era. But the pleasure is short, more and more, and pain, physical and essential, lurks in even before the idea manifest. In the race against the quadrille, all shortcuts are worth. Flee pain rather than to procure pleasure. Running away from pain, body aches, first. When the quadrille was about and perhaps never will, only rest-no risks are worth.
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