From time to time he jumps in Spain any news related to basuco. It doesn’t happen often. The last time was in L’Hospitalet, where on the 3rd the Mossos d’Esquadra dismantled a point of sale and consumption in an occupied warehouse in the Collblanc neighborhood. The article published in this newspaper described the drug as “a low-cost cocaine derivative that is highly addictive and has a short, but extremely virulent effect & rdquor ;, which, being a precise definition, is also scarce. After all, if cocaine or ecstasy have for them the ‘penthouse’ of the building, with opulent views over the city, the basuco crawls through the cellars, miserable and desperate. Basuco is said to be the drug of the poor, but basuco has nothing to do with resources: it is the drug of despair.
Since the news about basuco is scarce, the average citizen does not have it in his imagination. The usual dealer sells coca, pills, heroin, but it is difficult for him to sell basuco. It circulates so little compared to its wealthy relatives that Energy Control, the entity that promotes responsible consumption of drugs, an always reliable source, admits that he does not have enough information about basuco to make any assessment. It’s a ghost, a ghost drug. The dark story that surrounds her it has been built across the ocean, in Latin America, where its use is more common. Where is it really common?
“… basuco corrupts, you know what it’s like to see young boys, ‘taken’, who tell you: give me basuco and do whatever with me… For a ‘whistle’, both young people and girls are sold, always what is going to interest is to consume and consume…” “On Seventh Street, below Tenth Avenue, there were seedy residences where they rented for a few pesos the wet and smelly pieces to ‘blow’ basuco and rest from a day of crime. El Cartucho was an urban maelstrom that swallowed forever those who crossed the drug threshold. There, a ‘nero’ with a blanket over his shoulder was worth the same as an executive with a tie and a cloth jacket & rdquor ;. “And it is that the importance of the pipe lies in the ‘therapy’: it is about the fat accumulated after smoking and smoking basuco, which is reduced to such an extent that it becomes a much stronger substance for any smoker. The ‘therapy’ is sometimes the cause of people fighting and killing each other when a pipe is stolen or lost & rdquor ;.
Appointments are part of the work of a team of investigation of the Mayor’s Office of Bogotá on El Cartucho, a labyrinth of streets in the center of Bogotá that for many years functioned as a kind of independent republic of infamy: there, in deplorable conditions, criminals, homeless people, prostitutes lived and, above all, thousands of recyclers who walked through the city to later sell the material to local merchants. To understand the infamy: in the Cartucho the care and maintenance of the kidnapped was subcontracted. To understand it better: there were two professionals who they made a living by dismembering of corpses. That was the Cartridge, and that was the habitat of the basuco.
What exactly is basuco? the basuco made with cocaine residue mixed with other substances. Substances may vary. According to the definition proposed on its website give him headthe homologous entity of Energy Control in Bogotá, “basuco is a psychoactive substance composed mainly of the extraction of coca leaf alkaloids that are not processed to become cocaine hydrochloride, also known as cocaine base paste & rdquor ;. Which can be mixed with a variety of products: caffeine, mannitol, sodium bicarbonate, lidocaines, amphetamines, acetone, red gasoline and even insecticide. In some cases, explains Échele Cabeza, with brick dust or white cement. In El Cartucho, as former inhabitants of the place explained to the municipal investigators, with the powder obtained from scraping the bones of the dead. There was plenty.
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The word ‘basuco’ is obtained from the union of three words, ‘garbage’, ‘dirty’ and ‘coca’, As the journalist Juan Carlos Forero recalls, who worked in the local section of the newspaper ‘El Espectador’ at the time, so to speak, of the splendor of El Cartucho. “Basuco has been very present in the life of the inhabitants of the streets of Bogotá, who have historically concentrated in sectors such as San Bernardo, Las Cruces, el Cartucho, El Bronx or Cinco Huecos, ‘pots’ of vice for the sale and consumption of narcotic drugs at retail & rdquor ;. The basuco, he adds, became fashionable among the upper classes of Bogota in the mid-1980s, but quickly, from the festive name of “cocaine to smoke & rdquor; It became known as “the devil’s drug & rdquor ;. The rich had discovered the long-term consequences. Its effects on the cardiovascular system and the central nervous system are devastating.
Basuco is tremendously addictive, and the effect of a ‘bicha’ (ballot) is limited, very limited: lasts while smoked. That’s why addicts they spend the day smoking, one pipe after another. There is nothing festive about it. Basuco is the last step, vice for vice’s sake, despair. Pure despair.