A Experiência espacial de pessoas que usam crack e/ou similares no Centro Histórico de Belém: territorialidade e lugaridade no espaço

Abstract

The use of crack and/or similar drugs has shown new developments in the problem of drugs, due to its great visibility in public spaces in several Brazilian cities. The present work aims to understand the sense of microterritoriality of people who use crack and/or similar in the public space of the Historic Center of Belém (CHB), aiming to compose a presentation of the subjects involved in the constitution of the scenes of drug use, a description of its forms of sociability, as well as the affections and tensions surrounding its practices, the typifications and images that configure placeness and territorialities, from a case study with inspirations from existential phenomenology and ethnography, involving several procedures: bibliographic review, fieldwork, composing diary notes, and in-depth interviews. Throughout the research we identified that the subjects that integrate the scenes of crack and/or similar use in the public space are immersed in contexts of vulnerability and disaffiliation, where the problematic use of such substances and family tensions catalyze impulses to the street, an evasion home. Faced with such circumstances, their placeness are characterized by a shuffling of topophilic and topophobic images, adding to the fleeting euphoria of the drug, with a resentment around its use. Microterritoriality, on the other hand, is evidenced by the encounter between subjects who establish harmful uses of the drug, in the process of “exile”, or in homeless situation, aiming to compose spaces where they can establish their practices, intersubjective convergences, with the use of limited typification systems. Thus, the person who uses crack and/or the like presents a spatial peculiarity in their disaffiliation, since not only are they detached from their family, social and economic realities, there is a dismemberment of their own existential space.