“Fazendo os corres” no Cuca Jangurussu: noções e práticas de redução de riscos e danos relacionados ao uso de drogas entre jovens da periferia de Fortaleza (CE)

Abstract

This research situates the existing problematic between a team of educators / social workers linked both to the Human Rights Promotion Directorate of Cuca Jangurussu (public equipment aimed at enabling and enhancing the access of young people to culture, art, science, leisure and sport located in Jangurussu, a neighborhood of Fortaleza in Ceará, Brazil) and ‘Nuced’ (Center for Drug Studies of the Department of Psychology of the Federal University of Ceará), and young beneficiaries of public policies carried out by/at Cuca concerning the implementation of so-called harm reduction actions. The ‘network of interlocutors’ became central to the research, and the argument for the work was built by being with these individuals. Social sciences studies on the uses of psychoactive drugs and their intersections with public health and public policies formed the guidelines for observing, analyzing and proposing actions aimed at reducing harm among impoverished young people living in peripheral urban contexts. I reported on how the actions and interventions to reduce risks and harm were appropriated by those individuals based on their identity, ethnic and socioeconomic perspectives. I also carried out situational analyzes on how these harm reduction actions / strategies were planned, executed and appropriated, in order to guarantee for the black and mixed-race youth living in a peripheral neighborhood where Cuca operates, the right of ownership of their own bodies. I approached the locus, understood as the central research field of the present thesis, based on actions proposed by Nuced. As a volunteer at Nuced, I joined the youth and other residents of that region, and incorporated into the work their narratives, trajectories and life stories, more specifically based on accounts of a young woman and a young man who at the time were university students at undergraduate and graduate level, as they show themselves to be fierce activists in the community. The notion of risk and harm reduction (re)established in this field of research was spread by contextual aspects in which legal, social and political factors were superimposed on physiological ones, in terms of the importance given to the notion of care in the discourses and practices of those young people. As a result, the research helps to situate how the actions and strategies offered by the State to reduce drug-related harm are creatively transformed by this fraction of the young population living on the outskirts of Fortaleza.