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"It's so good," Joao says, trying to hold the smoke in his lungs as long as he can. "The pleasure of this drug is at this very moment. When you inhale, it's the first five seconds that is the ecstasy of this drug, when it comes to your brain. You feel your ear making a buzzing sound. You forget everything. The only thing in my head right now is the sensation of the drug."
It's one of the most destructive new drugs hitting Brazil - called "Oxi" on the streets - and has its origins here in the Amazon region. It is cheap, powerful and lethal. So lethal, in fact, that odds are both these two young men, if they continue to smoke it, will be dead within a year.
What is Oxi?
On the surface, Oxi is not a particularly unique drug. It is a derivative of cocaine paste, the clay-like foundation product used to make crack and refined powder cocaine. To make Oxi, chunks of freebase cocaine are soaked in gasoline. When gasoline is not available, kerosene is sometimes used. It is then mixed with limestone powder, a product used in construction. Easily attainable household solvents, like cleaning chemicals, are also sometimes added to the toxic mixture. In the final process, the rocks are dried, often simply under the sun, and then sold on the streets for consumption.
According to police, with cocaine paste as the main ingredient, Oxi can be made very easily and cheaply without the need for a background in chemistry - unlike refined powder cocaine, which needs the infrastructure of a laboratory to produce, and is much more time-consuming and complicated.
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