The death toll among drug addicts who smuggled cocaine in Argentina’s Buenos Aires province has risen to 23, with 84 people still in hospital, about 20 of them intubated, TN reported on Thursday night.
The Ministry of Health has set up a special committee responsible for monitoring new cases of poisoning in the country. Analyzes are ongoing to determine which substance was used to counterfeit the cocaine, with authorities not ruling out the possibility that it was a rat poison.
Police are investigating the case and have made several arrests.
Authorities believe the situation “stabilized” after recovering much of the adulterated cocaine, but the case brought to light the extent to which the problem of drug addiction in the Latin American country has reached a deep economic crisis.
“We have stabilized the situation,” said Carlos Bianco, the head of state. He ruled that an even greater “tragedy” was avoided thanks to the seizure of “a large amount of doses”.
Provincial Health Minister Nicholas Creplak told a news conference that the main point of sale, in Loma Ermosa, a slum some 40 kilometers northwest of downtown Buenos Aires, had been “dismantled” and “confiscated”. He did not specify how many of them were forged.
Three local network traffickers were arrested yesterday at dawn. In total, the authorities reported ten arrests. Eight people remained in custody yesterday, according to Argentine media.
Provincial Security Minister Sergio Burnie ruled out the fraud being deliberately committed as part of a “war” between rival drug-trafficking gangs.
There have been several other cases in the last 36 hours of people with “mild symptoms” of poisoning, such as “altered consciousness, vomiting, malaise and headache.” In total, 214 people were examined.
It all started yesterday morning, when deaths began to be reported and more and more people were admitted to hospitals with poisoning, of varying degrees of severity, in three areas of Buenos Aires. Several of the people admitted to the hospital admitted to the medical and nursing staff that they had used cocaine.
The victims, among them several in their thirties and forties, suffered loss of consciousness, violent convulsions and sudden heart attacks, according to medical reports cited by Argentine media.
Secretary Creplak told reporters that “three people who had been released from hospital after being poisoned were re-admitted (to hospitals) on Thursday because they were taking cocaine again.”
For Federal Security Minister Anibal Fernandez, the drug problem in the wider Buenos Aires, with a population of 14 million, “is as big as ever, but the aggravating factor is the overproduction and oversupply” of low quality substances at low prices. In other words, accessible to people living in poverty, which now affects 40% of Argentines.
Sergio Bernie, for his part, estimates that in the province of Buenos Aires (population 18 million) “about 250,000 doses of cocaine a day are sold” and that is a conservative estimate, he stressed.
“Of course the parents, the families, have to help the drug addicts,” Blanca, the mother of a 31-year-old man who continues to be treated, told TN. “But society must also help. I want him to go (to a detox center). But the centers are expensive: they ask for 60,000, 70,000 pesos (500, 580 euros), which I do not have to give “.
Argentina became a major destination for drug trafficking in the 1970s. In the 1980s, cocaine seizures reached half a tonne a year. A decade later, the quantity had quadrupled.
In 2017, a record amount of 12.1 tons was seized, according to official data, but in the last two years the seizures have decreased, among other things due to the restrictions imposed to reduce the pandemic of the new coronavirus. In 2020, 2.7 tons were seized.
For drug addict Alberto Calavrese, the underestimation of drug use is “very high”; it is “very likely that it is still rising, due to poverty and lack of prospects,” he warns. But to pose the problem as if it concerns only the poorest “would be a mistake”, as drug addiction “permeates society”, he adds.
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