Cracking up

ON THE pavements around Parque da Luz in São Paulo’s old city-centre, skeletal rag-covered figures loll. This is the heart of the district known as Cracolândia (“Crackland”)—a few dozen streets used since the 1990s as an open-air crack den. As addicts moved in, law-abiding businesses and residents fled. Those who remain pay rock-bottom rents, pull down their shutters at 6pm and stay in at night.

São Paulo’s Cracolândia was Brazil’s first and is still its biggest. It is home to 2,000 addicts. But most Brazilian cities now have similar districts. Recent studies put the country’s crack-using population at 1m-1.2m, the world’s largest. In the past 20 years, as American consumers shifted to synthetic drugs, traffickers in the coca-growing countries—Bolivia, Colombia and Peru—sought new markets. Brazil shares long, porous borders with all three. Its growing prosperity ensured customers. The gangs born in its hellish prisons handled distribution.