Argentina: 20 dead and 74 seriously ill due to adulterated cocaine

At least 20 people died and more than 70 were hospitalized in northwestern suburbs Buenos Aires in a massive intoxication by adulterated cocaine, presumably with opiatesOfficial sources said on Wednesday.

(In context: Relatives of the victims of adulterated cocaine in Argentina speak)

The health authorities issued an “epidemiological alert” in the afternoon for consumption of cocaine altered with “opiates” and its emergency services continued to register people “in serious condition” and causing a “constant increase in hospitalized people.”

To read: New confrontations are reported in an Ecuadorian prison hit by massacres

What was adulterated cocaine in Argentina

“There are deaths on public roads and in homes that have not yet been identified,” a spokesman for the provincial Ministry of Health told the newspaper. AFP. The police arrested at least 10 people in a house in the impoverished Tres de Febrero neighborhood, 40 kilometers from the capital, where they presume that the adulterated cocaine was mixed and distributed.

The prosecutor’s office asked cocaine buyers in the populous belt that surrounds the Argentine capital of some 14 million inhabitants to dispose of recently acquired drugs.

“It has been determined that a highly toxic substance marketed as cocaine is circulating,” said the District Attorney’s Office for San Martin, one of the towns where deaths were reported, in addition to Hurlingham and Tres de Febrero.

The victimsamong which there are several men between 30 and 40 years old, would have suffered violent seizures and cardiac arrest, according to medical reports cited by various media. Beatrice Market told the AFP who found her 31-year-old son lying in the kitchen at dawn and took him to the hospital.

“I found him lying on the floor. Bad, very bad, he hardly breathed, with his eyes back,” he said. On Wednesday night he was still hospitalized and with respiratory assistance. The brother-in-law of María Morales, 41, “is intubated and in serious condition.”

“We want him to get ahead and be cured of his addiction,” Morales said. Those hospitalized were distributed in eight hospitals in the north and west of Greater Buenos Aires, detailed a spokesman for the Buenos Aires Ministry of Security.

The Buenos Aires Secretary of Security, Sergio Berni, explained that “every dealer (seller) who buys cocaine, fractionates it. Some do it with non-toxic substances, such as starch. Others put hallucinogens in it and if you don’t have any kind of control These things happen.”

San Martin’s attorney general, Marcelo Lapargo, described the incident as “absolutely exceptional.” “People say that this happens in Central America or in other places, but (here) the truth is never. It may be a reckoning, but it is conjectural because we have no history,” the judicial official told Radio Miter.

(In other news: Narcos tried to export 20 thousand coconuts with cocaine from Cartagena to Italy)

‘I had never seen anything like it’

In the site raided by the police, cocaine was found in packages similar to those provided by relatives of one of the victims and which are now being analyzed in laboratories of the Judicial Branch.

The investigation began when four people, who later died, arrived at Hurlingham Public Hospital on Wednesday morning and told doctors they had used cocaine during a meeting, medical sources said.

The head of toxicology at the Fernandez Hospital in Buenos Aires, Carlos Damin, said that “he had never seen anything like this.” “As a minimum we started with 30% adulterant,” he explained to the media.

At the end of the afternoon, residents of the Loma Hermosa neighborhood protested, blocked streets and clashed with the police, who arrested young people in the area related to the case and destroyed part of their homes, according to what the residents denounced in dialogue with a journalist of the AFP.

Sociologist Alberto Calabrese, an expert on addictions, told the AFP that “in poor places it can happen that the consumption is of cut substances and when the cut occurs, as in these cases, or because a drug dealer put his hand in to harm another or because someone was wrong, it costs lives.”

In 2016, the previous government declared a “National Addiction Emergency” because along with “the advance of drug trafficking (…) drug use has increased,” but the measure lost force in 2018.

According to a last official balance released in 2019, between 2015 and 2018 the number of detainees for illegal drug trafficking in Argentina grew by 147%. 144% more synthetic drugs and 54.7% more cocaine totaling more than 26 tons were seized in those three years.

AFP

More news