A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria: CRACK-ZONE - What drug will there be after crack? (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Crack seems almost perfect for now, it solves the problem of poverty at 
the root, cleans up the streets and facilitates and increases drug 
trafficking on all levels because with crack you don't stop, at most you 
add: something to get out of bed, something to sleep, psychotropic drugs 
at Sert, heroin on the streets, drops to take away the anxiety of down, 
paranoia, abstinence, malaise, everything to be able to continue doing 
crack. --- Since it destroyed entire communities of African Americans in 
the Bronx, crack has traveled around the world, traveling with documents 
in hand, landing in ports and arriving in the streets of big cities and 
small ones. Crack is the shock therapy to protect decorum and apparent 
well-being because it reduces the poor to the minimum. The side effect 
also happens and devours the lower middle class who wanted to have fun 
but it is on large numbers that statistics are based.

If you don't have 10 you can get by with 5 euros if you micro-dose and 
if you prostitute yourself it's free.

5 euros is the price of a zombie life in a crack zone, a life that lasts 
half an hour and then there's down, then again, then down, and on and on 
until you go to sleep, until you're done. No house behind closed doors, 
no threshold to hide, no limits or border lines in the crack zones 
because, in this case, it is the rest of the world that one should hide, 
it is what one is fleeing from that one should be ashamed of. A stone's 
throw from the police forces, a stone's throw from the shops and holiday 
homes for tourists, everything happens outside. A few steps from the 
usual road home, thousands of stories collide in a common destiny that 
no one will remember. Your friend, your daughter or your parents, the 
starving, you or anyone else, crack spreads unstoppably. So the areas 
expand, the poor are contained and the government wages war on cannabis 
users, fills prisons for drug-related crimes, clogs up the courts, slows 
down bureaucracy, wages war on self-production and favors organized 
crime , i.e. the finance.

The government strikes blows of repression, control and destruction of 
the public space now in the hands of private individuals and punishes 
free non-profit sociality, that only possibility of creating an 
individual and collective identity, the one that creates culture that 
persists in the time, which is passed down to future generations. Free 
sociality is now illegal, it is forbidden, it is outside public order.

In a world where the cost of living undergoes a dizzying rise, that of 
street drugs decreases in a directly proportional manner and the greater 
the destructive and addictive force, the lower the price has now fallen 
below that of a sandwich or a "house cutting board".

Crack dominates the streets of large cities and small ones and without 
going beyond the border it presides over the poorest neighborhoods of 
Palermo, Naples, Rome, Milan and everything in between. From north to 
south it is the cheapest, omnipresent and together with weapons, the 
cocaine market from which it is obtained is the most prosperous market 
in the world: in Europe alone there are around 8 billion euros a year 
which certainly cannot be done without .

Crack is the perfect symbol of our times because it satisfies and then 
fuels the dissatisfaction and unconscious desire for extinction that is 
the basis of consumer society: I consume and devour first of all myself, 
my existence. Crack hijacks the pleasure centers of the brain which will 
prefer it to everything, to life itself. Already from the first times it 
anesthetizes the centers of enjoyment of all those things that were 
previously gratifying and which immediately lose interest; they will no 
longer produce pleasure or any meaning.

We are addicted to everything that anesthetizes the need to change 
things. We depend on those things, we depend on someone, on technology, 
on social media, on anxiolytics, antidepressants and on substances that 
restrict consciousness to the point of losing the principle of reality 
and criticism. We depend on false needs and on this increasingly 
ephemeral and increasingly elitist fictitious well-being because we are 
less free than the useless goods that we compulsively produce.

In all human beings, dependence is a place of the psyche: the first is 
towards the parents and then towards what generates some form of balance 
in the individual. In the social context we should learn the limit that 
the habit of addictions must have, the quantity, the non-fatal "dose", 
and it is possible by educating ourselves on autonomy, investing in 
knowledge, learning to find solutions to problems like plants do and not 
to delegate them. We are the weakest species on earth, someone says, 
because we are the most assisted and technologically assisted.

And then those hollow, angry faces and the syncopated movements of a 
hand reaching out to ask for your money, your peace of mind, your 
privilege. That hand is the bridge between two classes that are now 
increasingly distant, polarized on an enormous gap into which, going 
forward, we cannot avoid falling. A crack-zone is the crack in urban 
space, it is the tear that cannot be patched up and which establishes 
definitively and peremptorily that everything else around, the cities 
and historic centers, are clearly non-places where we have consumed our 
imagination and destroyed every possibility of participating and 
planning a decent life, if not the eternal class conflict between those 
who can buy and those who cannot.

The crack-zones, capitals of the world as we have finished it, 
meticulously laid out at aperitif time, consumed and paid for more or 
less to the detriment of oneself, there where God is dead and no 
substitute can be found, where "The lights of the city" are electrocuted 
and the film is a silent black and white film. Crack is the almost 
perfect product, it is the crack from which to look at all the enormous 
contradictions that are collapsing and will collapse, where one can say 
without any hypocrisy that one has torn one's humanity to pieces because 
it struggled to be.

What drug will there be after crack?

If God created something better than crack then he really kept it to 
himself. Whether you are black, white, Chinese, rich, poor, at the first 
shot you go on a mission and that mission never ends. Even when you no 
longer have a home, no money, no one and they throw you in, you're there 
looking for a shot, until the moment the mission ends,

when you're underground.

(Dialogue excerpted from Clockers by Spike Lee, 1995)

Laura

http://sicilialibertaria.it
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