HARM REDUCTION AND STREET POPULATION IN FRANCA: pipes and cans

Abstract

The article aims to understand the possibilities of Harm Reduction practices based on the question of how the pipe / can constitutes the relationship of the homeless person with crack. The experience reported here comes from holding, through the Núcleo de Cidadania Ativa extension, pipe workshops with users of Centro POP de Franca, in partnership with Consultório na Rua. Such workshops start from the assumption that what crack consumption is ritualized in a stereotyped sequence of gestures, endowed with a subjective meaning, to which proposals for self-regulation in the relationship between the individual and the substance can be constructed. For that, René Barbier's Existential Action Research was used. As a result, we observed the manifestation of six differentiations between the use of a pipe or a can for crack consumption: effects, notions of health, availability of tools, relationship between individual-crack, consumption space and production of "resin". Finally, we found that bringing pipes and cans to the foreground is a strategy for building bonds between professionals and users; it allowed the team of the Consultório na Rua to get closer to the practices that permeate the consumption of crack and possibilities to build notions of health in this ritual; that the production of pipes has a creative quality, and in dialogue with the reuse of discarded materials.