Bogota, the capital of Colombia, is testing out a new strategy to curb the country’s rampant drug problem, by transitioning users of “basuco” (a type of cocaine similar to crack) to less-damaging marijuana. The country has been attempting to control basuco addiction for years, and experts estimate that Bogota has at least 7,000 “problem” users, especially in poorer communities. Like crack, the drug is smokeable and cheap, and dealers will often bulk it up with additives like ash and crushed bricks. To confront the problem, Bogota plans to test out “controlled consumption centers” where addicts will be given marijuana to help mitigate withdrawal symptoms and ween them off the harder, more harmful drug. “The first thing you do is to start to reduce the dose,” explains Julián Quintero, from the non-profit organization Acción Técnica Social, which works on drug policy. “After that, you begin to change the way that it’s administered: if you were injecting heroin, you move to smoking heroin; after smoking heroin, you move to combining it with cannabis; after that, you’re staying with the cannabis. What you’re looking for is for the person to reach a point where they can stabilize the consumption and that the consumption doesn’t prevent them from being functional.” Whether or not the program is successful, the tactic is unlikely to catch on in the US, according to Amanda Reiman, a policy manager with the Drug Policy Alliance. “Unfortunately, [US] universities rely on grants from the federal government for research, so most of what they do is what the feds want done,” says Reiman, “As you can probably guess, the feds are not too interested in beneficial uses for marijuana, and even less interested in how to help people who are addicted to substances, so most of the research in this area occurs outside the US or through private funding.”
