“It’s a horrible life. You don’t eat. You don’t sleep. Any money you can get goes on crack,” says Felipa Drumont.



Drumont is 26, trans, homeless and addicted to crack. For the last four years, she has lived on the streets of an area of central São Paulo that has become infamous: Cracolândia, literally “Crackland”.

Here, hundreds of people sit in the middle of the street, wrapped in blankets, and smoke crack openly. Others wander, wild eyed, looking for tin cans and other recyclables to sell. Most are skinny and gaunt, faces contorted from years of drug abuse. There is garbage everywhere and a thick smell of body odour.

Police patrol the perimeter, just metres away. They keep an eye on things but don’t intervene with the drug-taking or dealing. Instead, they mostly watch for other crimes, such as robbery. Municipal officers and NGO workers hover nearby.

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Even more surprisingly, on weekdays, there are also workers with backpacks and suited office types, who scurry past on the opposite side of the street. Despite being a scene of intense urban degradation, Crackland in fact sits on prime real estate.

Cracolândia sits on prime real estate in São Paulo’s downtown. Photograph: Joel Silva/Folhapress

It is next to Luz, the city’s biggest and busiest train station. Less than 100m away is a neoclassical style concert hall that last year hosted a performance by American jazz legend Herbie Hancock. There are private technical colleges nearby, and a leisure centre. The office of South America’s biggest newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, known sometimes as the New York Times of Brazil, is a few blocks away.

None of it makes much difference to the addicts. Some exchange jokes or handshakes with each other, but most just look bewildered and lost.

Crackland is over and won’t come back Mayor João Doria

It is unlike nearly anything in any city in the world. To some, including the current mayor, João Doria, that makes it an embarrassment.

After taking office in January, the business mogul declared war on Crackland. Early on a drizzly Sunday morning in May, Drumont watched as helicopters appeared overhead, and a veritable battalion of 900 armed police and security agents descended on the addicts. She says the police used rubber bullets and stun grenades to disperse the crowd.

“The police turned up throwing bombs at everyone,” she recalls. “Thank god I wasn’t injured, but I was terrified.”

Drumont and hundreds of other addicts scattered. Many took refuge in a nearby gas station; others checked themselves in for treatment at government programmes, or were accompanied by city social services to packed homeless shelters.

After breaking up the crack market, police raided local properties, seized drugs and guns, and arrested dozens of suspected traffickers.

Local government officials heralded the operation a success. Doria, triumphant, declared: “Crackland is over and won’t come back.”

Six months later, Crackland continues, just metres away from where it was cleared.

A police operation against Crackland this summer. Photograph: Fernando Bizerra Jr/EPA

Hamsterdam, Brazil

For readers familiar with the American TV series The Wire, Crackland looks like “Hamsterdam” – a section of vacant city blocks where, in an attempt to bring down street crime, Baltimore police set up a “free zone” for drug dealers and addicts.



There are, however, two key differences. First, Cracolândia isn’t located in vacant land, but right in the middle of the bustling downtown core. The area has been gentrifying, and an ambitious revitalisation is planned for 2018, including 1,200 new apartments.

The second difference is that this brazen drug scene has been a stubborn fixture of downtown São Paulo for more than two decades.

After Cracolândia first appeared in the 1990s, when the highly addictive smoked form of cocaine entered the city’s narcotics market, a succession of governments have tried – and failed – to end it, mostly via repressive policing.

Since then, the fluxo (“flow”), as the concentration of users is known, has moved around the neighbourhood, chased from street to street by heavy-handed police operations.



In 2008, mayor Gilberto Kassab sent police to disperse the addicts, just as his successor Fernando Haddad would nine years later. Kassab, as Doria did, declared: “Crackland no longer exists.”

In 2012, the city’s then-justice secretary said the same thing, this time in relation to a crackdown dubbed “Operation Pain and Suffering”.

Both times, the addicts simply regrouped down the street.

After the raid in May, Cracolândia re-formed just 400m away, in a park. Drumont followed: the raid didn’t dissuade her from taking crack. “I used even more drugs because I was nervous and scared,” she says.

Police officers confront Crackland addicts. Photograph: Paulo Whitaker/Reuters

Nevertheless, for those who say Crackland must go, the tactics enjoy broad approval. Supporters consider Crackland a menace, arguing that it gives power to organised crime, degrades the city and perpetuates a cycle of drug addiction and misery.

Exact data is scarce, but it is thought Brazil is home to the highest number of crack users in the world. According to the last national crack survey in 2014 by the Fiocruz medical institute, there are around 370,000 regular users in 27 city state capitals and the federal district.



Brazil shares porous borders with all of the main cocaine-producing nations: Bolivia, Colombia and Peru.

[This] is a classic example of the ‘war on drugs’ approach that for decades has failed to reduce drug use … César Muñoz

São Paulo is also the base of Brazil’s most powerful drug trafficking gang, the PCC (“First Command of the Capital”). Authorities say the PCC plays a controlling role in supplying Crackland.

According to them, the crackdown was necessary to break the hold of drug trafficking in the neighbourhood.



“With the [May] operation, the state retook territory that was dominated by drug traffic, facilitating the work of health and social workers,” says Floriano Pesaro, social development secretary for São Paulo state government.

As evidence for the success of their strategy, they point to a study – commissioned by the state government – showing that Crackland has got smaller: from 1,861 users before the operation in May to 414 in July, a reduction of 77%.

Clarice Sandi Madruga, coordinator of the survey, says there are many reasons for the drop. Some addicts have sought help, she says; others used the opportunity of the operation to flee from debts with drug dealers.

What’s more, she says, as many as one third of current Crackland residents are new arrivals who come for the services, such as health treatment and meals (provided by City Hall), and the relative safety. (Drumont corroborates that claim: for junkies, she says, there is a certainly safety in numbers, providing you don’t break the rules, such as stealing from others.)

For Madruga, notwithstanding the fact that Crackland still exists, the combination of a bit of carrot and a lot of stick has worked. “Something needed to be done,” she said.



Municipal workers remove demolished shacks from Princesa Isabel square in Crackland after the latest police raids. Photograph: Nelson Almeida/AFP/Getty Images

Addicted and abandoned

But if many Paulistanos supported the raid – 60%, according to a poll by Datafolha – many others did not.

They argue that Crackland is symptomatic of the city’s wider problems: of poverty, homelessness and inequality. They say Cracolândia, for all its problems, acts as a refuge for the city’s addicted, downtrodden and abandoned.

“The effort by the São Paulo government is a classic example of the ‘war on drugs’ approach that for decades has failed to reduce drug use, driven people who use drugs away from essential health services, and given rise to widespread human rights violations,” says Cesar Munoz, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.



Even inside government, some officials are irate, seeing in the raid the same old discredited tactics.

“The traffickers they arrested are just small-time dealers,” says Arthur Pinto Filho, a senior official of the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights in Public Health of the state of Sao Paulo.

“The traffic continues,” he adds. “It was a huge waste of public money: they are in the same spot. It was a step backwards. This is the same thing that has been done for years and never worked.”

Although everyone agrees Crackland is smaller than it was at its peak, many are sceptical of the government’s explanation, and say it’s probably due to a simple fact: police violence.



“Even if there was a reduction of this size, it’s not because of treatment, stopping to use or quality of life,” says Thiago Calil of the NGO É de Lei, who has worked in the region for 13 years. “[Addicts] are leaving the centre because there is huge police repression.”

Fires burn during this summer’s police operation against Crackland. Photograph: Paulo Whitaker/Reuters

City Hall employs more than 150 health workers in the Crackland area. Two of them, not authorised to speak on record, said that the police raids had increased mistrust and made it more difficult to approach addicts to help.

Yet another criticism is that raids merely disperse users into “mini-Cracklands”, of dozens rather than hundreds of addicts. At least 22 of these have been identified across the city.

“We understand from our teams that users have gone from the centre, and are using crack in other scenes, more on the outskirts of the city,” said Calil.

Better 22 mini-Cracklands than one big Cracolândia, argues Felipe Sabara, secretary of social assistance at São Paulo city government. He claims it’s easier to provide social assistance to users if they are less concentrated.

“The more people there are, the bigger density the crowd, the harder the approach,” Sabara says, blaming organised crime and the connection that users establish with their turf.

Sabara says his team is expanding outreach services across the city to deal with the dispersal, and disputed the accusation that City Hall merely wants to sweep Crackland under the rug in order to help gentrify the neighbourhood.

“We are doing the opposite,” he says. “We are resolving the problem.”

Still, Pesaro is under no illusions that Crackland has easy solutions. “We know that it will be a difficult and long process,” he adds.

Even Doria has backpedalled, now noting that Crackland is a historic problem, and saying the focus should be “to reduce it sensibly and end the 24-hour drug shopping mall”.



Crackland in June 2014, ahead of the World Cup. Photograph: Reuters

Redemption

Six months since the raid, Drumont is now two months clean. She lives in Tent 2, a structure set up by City Hall in the heart of Crackland, where she gets a bed and meals as part of a programme called Redemption.

The beds are in portable shipping containers; there are more than 300 spaces, and warm showers.

We need more opportunity … not just meals and handouts Felipa Drumont

She says it was the raid that got her off the streets: the escalation of police operations prompted her to get clean and seek assistance.

“Things were always bad here, but they’re getting worse,” she says.

She wants to find a job, and is waiting for a space in a city shelter for LGBT people; but her first priority is to sort out her ID and other documents, which she lost while sleeping rough.

She faces two huge barriers to employment, however: lack of education and her identity as a trans woman. At least in Crackland, she says, no one judged her.

“We need more opportunity,” she says. “Not just meals and handouts.”

Sabara says the government recognises this ultimate need, and points to the New Job programme, which he says has created more than 1,500 jobs for people living on the streets. Twenty-two are from Cracolândia.

But for Cleizer Alves de Paulo, 31, who continues to smoke crack each day, such opportunities seem far off. Cleizer lives in one of the local hotels and makes money tattooing drug dealers in the heart of Crackland. He has been imprisoned five times, the first time for armed robbery.

“No one wants to employ someone who is addicted to drugs,” he says.

The previous administration, led by the left-leaning Haddad, instituted a programme called Bracos Abertos (“Of Open Arms”), in which some 450 addicts were given a cash stipend and shelter in exchange for sweeping the streets and other small custodial tasks.

The programme was praised by international drug reform agencies, including the Open Society Foundation; but after critics said that the hotels where the addicts were housed had become dominated by drug traffickers, Doria promised to end it. Today, it scrapes by on a skeleton staff, and is expected to shut for good in December.

It is precisely this pendulum swinging between two political approaches – to inflict or reduce harm – that Francisco Inacio Bastos, who led the last national crack survey in 2014, blames for Crackland’s disturbing longevity.

São Paulo has changed mayor every four years, he notes, and at the heart of the Crackland problem is an ideological debate in Brazil of how drug addiction should be treated.

“What we see is change of project every administration, without any continuation. It’s all political. We need a minimum of a consensus, nationwide,” he argues. “Not right or left, but based on scientific arguments worldwide. Without this, will continue as it is.”

For Drumont, despite her two months of sobriety, the allure of Crackland remains strong. She abandoned her apartment after taking up crack, and like many addicts, most of whom have little contact with their families, she says Crackland’s main appeal is its community feel, however dysfunctional.

“We are like a family of the excluded,” she says.

Guardian Cities is in São Paulo for a special series of in-depth reporting and live events. Share your experiences of the city in the comments below, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram using #GuardianSaoPaulo, or by email to saopaulo.week@theguardian.com