Daniel Ramírez speaks slowly. He is surprised by the number of scars he has on his forearms, reminders of cuts made patiently, in order, always parallel to each other. He says that he lives from the sale of cardboard that he collects on the street. On Tuesday night he consumed one of the 20,000 doses of adulterated cocaine that have already killed 23 people on the western outskirts of Buenos Aires. “I used it alone and I started to get dizzy, my eyes were cloudy,” he says at the door of the Carlos Bocalandro Hospital, in San Martin. He has just been discharged. “There are seven, eight who died taking that cocaine. I have a friend who died because of this, his name was Paw, and others felt bad,” he says in a voice without feeling.
Daniel Ramírez’s wife has fiery red hair and gesticulates when she speaks. “We don’t live in Puerta 8, nothing to see. Gate 8 is that way,” she points to the west, “and our house is the other way.” Her husband nods his head, and without giving details says that he bought the drug “elsewhere, far away.” Nobody wants to talk about Gate 8, a tiny neighborhood of dirt streets and narrow corridors where the deadly drug was cut. The authorities immediately found the box where the cocaine had been “cooked”, because when the deaths occurred, he had been on the trail of local drug traffickers for four months.
This Thursday, it rained in Buenos Aires and to enter Gate 8 you have to walk on mud. Some 200 families live crammed into just four blocks, located in a triangle between the Buen Ayre highway, a stream, and the old Route 8. Downtown Buenos Aires is just over an hour’s drive away. There is a makeshift store behind a window and a woman sells fruit and vegetables in a garage. In the same street there is an evangelical church. “Hold on, Boca,” says a young man who passes in front of a mural with the River Plate club shield. It’s all he will say. At Gate 8 no one speaks, no one sees and no one listens. On Wednesday, the police arrested a dozen people whom they linked to the adulterated drug. He walked between brightly colored houses mixed with others of exposed brick. A day later, the children hide behind the curtains or beckon visitors from the corridors. A young mother with a baby in her arms asks not to speak. “Ask another neighbor,” she says.
The fear of drug traffickers is in the air. Puerta 8 is a center for drug dealing, where most of the cartoneros and garbage recyclers go who work in the so-called “Ceamse belt”, created in that area in the eighties by the dictatorship to manage the waste of the city of Buenos Aires. Cocaine from Puerta 8 is cheap, less than half the market value. In exchange, the client receives a very “stretched” drug with some innocuous powder, such as ibuprofen. But this time, it was different. A dozen members of the municipal health personnel tried this Thursday to detect possible victims of the adulterated drug house by house, although they know that most are not from the neighborhood. Like Ramírez, the cartonero who miraculously survived. The Minister of Security, Sergio Berni, and the Minister of Health of the province of Buenos Aires, Nicolás Kreplak, toured the hospital that treated him. “We neighbors know where the drugs are, we know everything,” a woman tells Berni. She has a relative in serious condition and asks for help. The officials give him encouragement and continue on their way.
Half an hour from there is the hospital in Hurlingham, another of those who received intoxicated. Mauro is admitted, but out of danger. His mother says that since Wednesday he lives an ordeal. “We brought it in after seeing the news. It is common to see it strange, but this was something different. My son is 33 years old, he is a man, but he is going through a bad situation. He is alive, but those who lost their children? How is it going?” I ask God to help my son,” she says through tears. Paola has spent a sleepless night accompanying her brother Manuel de Ella, 32, another survivor. “They are killing the kids like rats and the transas (narcos) are lining their pockets,” she says.
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Eighty people were still hospitalized 24 hours after consuming the drug, 20 of them in critical condition, connected to a respirator. What substance brought them to the brink of death is still unclear. Authorities know the cocaine was laced with a powerful opiate, possibly fentanyl, a synthetic morphine-like drug that is 50 times more potent than heroin. Why drug traffickers used fentanyl to stretch cocaine is still a mystery: it has a sedative effect, it is more expensive and it is not produced in Argentina. It was then thought of a war between gangs, which was soon ruled out because “no one threatens their own work,” says the Minister of Security, Sergio Berni. Or a trial to introduce fentanyl in the province that went wrong. The only sure thing, pending laboratory details, is the presence of an opiate, because the patients responded immediately to its antidote, naloxone. “When fentanyl is synthesized in a medicinal laboratory, it has guarantees. When produced in an illegal kitchen it can have any effect. A bad calculation and because of these mixtures that are being made with synthetic drugs, these things happen”, adds Berni.
In Argentina, fentanyl is commonly used in operating rooms, as anesthesia, and only circulates in hospitals and clinics. “You can’t get it in pharmacies, like in the United States,” says Carlos Damin, head of Toxicology at Fernández Hospital, one of the professionals who knows the most about opiates in Argentina. “First we have to see if the adulterated cocaine really had fentanyl or some other opiate,” says Dami. “If it is confirmed that it is fentanyl, we will be facing a totally new event in the country, because here there was never even heroin. We don’t have hospitals prepared for an opioid epidemic,” he warns, “and it would be a disaster.”
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