Emergencies and rescues: The logics of vulnerability and care among drug users in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Abstract

This article addresses the informal practices of care among drug users from vulnerable populations in Buenos Aires, within a context of economic crisis, criminalization, and marginalization. Based on ethnographic research carried out since 2001, I argue that this set of practices, knowledge, and social networking known locally as “rescuing” seek to minimize bodily harms, harm to relationships, as well as to reduce threats to survival. This analysis shows how this logic of care varies according to the type of substance consumed, gender, socioeconomic status, social capital, access to institutions, family networks, and life trajectories. Finally, the development of this logic of care for drug use based on rescuing practices, allows us to understand the relationships between structural transformations and everyday life through the processes the privatization of care and the politicization of suffering.

• Vulnerability, social catastrophe, drug use, logics of care

Notes

Notes

1. In Spanish, the word “rescue” has different meanings. Among the main ones are: to recover for payment or by force something that an enemy has taken, and by extension any object that passed into other hands; to free from danger, harm, a job, a nuisance, and oppression; to recover for one's use an object that one has forgotten, ruined, or lost (Royal Spanish Academy Dictionary).

2. Freebase cocaine and/or Paco are the names by which regular people and experts called a new kind of substances that circulates in the south cone (Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile).

3. This research is financially supported by CONICET, PIP No. 0565 and AGENCIA, (Secretary of Scientific Research Promotion) PICT No. 1675.

4. The initial neoliberal structural transformations in Argentina took place during the Military Dictatorship in the 1970s, and were intensified by structural reforms (privatization of state companies, internationalization of the financial system, work flexibility, destruction of national industry, etc.) carried out in the 1990s, until the political and economic collapse (Basualdo, 2001). During the 2001–2002 crisis, over half of the Argentine population was living in poverty. In Greater Buenos Aires the poverty rate increased 20% points in the period of 2001–2002. While unemployment reached 21.5%, demanding underemployment is 12.7%, and non-demanding underemployment is 5.9% (INDEC, July 2002).

5. With a complex health system (public, private, and social security), Argentina was inscribed in the Latin American tradition of health which integrated the following dimensions: health-illness is a component of everyday life's relationships and social actions; it recognizes an indissoluble bond between the processes of economy–politics and illness; political and community participation is a strategy to promote health, and finally, the State and public health is the guarantor of universal access to health.

6. Click: local term which refers a kind of turning point.