The return of the heroine

It has happened several times, this last week. At night I leave the trash on the street and walk around smoking a small cigar before going to bed, in the middle of Barcelona's Call neighborhood. A middle-aged man approaches me, trembling like a feverish patient, and asks me for a light for his cigarette. I know perfectly well that he is not only addicted to tobacco and I tell him to relax, to keep the lighter, because we have many at home. While saying "thank you" he runs to hide in one of the corners of the Placeta de Manuel Ribé, very close to the terrace of the Bistrot Levante and the old Main Synagogue of Barcelona. I know that he is not only fond of smoking because he has a spoon in his hand and also because, surely, tomorrow I will find him, still high on heroin, in the same place or in one of the corners of Plaza Neri, waking up due to the shouting of children going to school or that of tourists having breakfast in one of the most luxurious hotels in the neighborhood.

The problem with this scene is not (only) the discomfort of finding an unfortunate addict injecting himself next to home, nor that a person who can have dangerous behavior ---the result of his impatience--- is a few meters from so many children, nor even that the tourists who overcrowd Ciutat Vella wrinkle their noses at the sight of a heroin addict bothering them with the unbearable postcards they will upload to Instagram. The primary misfortune of this scene is the image of a person destroying their life with one of the most lethal opiates on the planet. Municipal authorities, through cleaning services (which collect about 2,500 syringes every month) say that heroin consumption in Barcelona has returned to pre-pandemic levels. My nose and the intuition of the neighbors do not have the power of statistics: but I would say that we are facing even more worrying figures.

Until now, public managers thought that police pressure on drug flats would be enough (again, my experience raises a question mark there: we had one operating below our house for over a year without anyone intervening) or by guaranteeing security around drug dens like Baluard del Raval. But the central problem continues to be drug trafficking and the insufficiency of social agents to mitigate it, added to the fact that opioid selling points are no longer focused solely on the city center (last summer, without going any further, two were dismantled in Gracia). City Council technicians will tell me that they promote the presence of civic agents in the neighborhoods (and it is true); but they should be reminded of something as basic as the fact that heroin addicts do not take drugs, commit crimes, or cause trouble during the daytime shift of a social educator.

At the beginning of this century, the writer Roberto Saviano already warned us that the Spanish state was invaded by Camorra money and that a large part of European drug trafficking, including heroin, passed through Barcelona. So did journalist Joan Queralt, who warned that mafia clans operate in our city through money laundering within the tourism and real estate sectors. It does not seem that our municipal officials have taken these warnings with the level of seriousness they entail. The problem, the responsibility, and the blame for all of this, in short, do not lie in the scene I described at the beginning, but in a whole complex system that, for now, roams freely through Barcelona without anyone providing solutions. Until they deal with the issue, tonight another kid will approach me, to whom I will give a lighter so he can continue destroying his life.