Estratégias de sobrevivência e movimentos de vida: práticas de redução de danos e autocuidado no discurso de pessoas que usam drogas em situação de rua em Belém/PA

Abstract

In this research, we sought to analyze the speeches of people who used drugs on the streets in the city of Belém/PA, in their daily survival practices carried out in urban spaces, and in relation to the use of strategies for harm reduction and the self-care in the streets, and in possible interfaces with public policies in search of governmental actions, or even in the search for new possibilities of life in the complexity of the city, verifying which particular forms of production of life movements are possible in the use of drugs from street situations. To this end, there was a discussion of some of the relationships between the model of contemporary society and the possible influences associated with the occurrence of the phenomena of consumption of psychoactive substances and street situations, which are often approximated to each other in the specialized literature, and credited with social vulnerability, marginalization or various social stigmas, allied to prohibitionist practices and different forms of governmentality. It was also discussed which practices of resistance would be possible to the strategies of domination and control of the productions of subjectivity and survival in urban settings, the potent and powerful current discourses, the many existing stigmas and the policies that generate inequalities widely adopted. On the other hand, there was a debate on public policies on drugs and the homeless population, as well as on the harm reduction strategy in its characteristics and on its emergence among us and in other countries, in addition to the possibilities of self-care on the streets by people who use substances, through their modes of circulation in the city, in the engendered modalities of survival and/or in the particular ways of producing life movements. The research was based on the method of analysis of discursive practices and on the choice of the field-theme people who used drugs on the streets, with the aim of contributing to expand the scope of social psychology in the study of relevant current themes, seeking to situate the complex and the contradictory relationships between drug use, harm reduction, Brazilian drug policy and public policies for citizenship and guaranteeing rights. It was found in the study that people who used drugs and lived on the streets of Belém/PA had peculiar strategies of survival, of relationship with urban spaces and the scenarios of use of the city, sometimes showing an expressive capacity for self-care, even spontaneously or intuitively practicing harm reduction strategies on the streets. Certain interfaces with public policies also appeared, mainly in health and social assistance, in the search and/or in the eventual encounter with some modalities of treatment of diseases, as well as the care for the reduction of harm to the use of substances, even during problematic use, and in very adverse social circumstances, not only in the midst of narratives of extreme deprivation of rights on city streets, but also of facing vulnerabilities, as possible results of life options or choices of their own. Circumstances related to a kind of exhaustion reached in the different personal trajectories that led them to use drugs on the streets and the frequent desires to get out of this condition emerged in the participants' reports, culminating in life changes movements on the part of some of the people interviewed, generally, after long years of substance use and a significant stay on the streets.