Crossroads of drugs: conflicts in subjects living on streets of Belo Horizonte–mg, Brazil

Abstract

This article aims to discuss the construction of morally oriented values of subjects who live in the central streets of the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais (Brazil), and who are users of licit and illicit drugs. This is the result of an ethnographic research, carried out between 2013 and 2017, by a team of researchers in the areas of Anthropology, Philosophy, Political Sciences, and students of undergraduate and graduate courses in Social Sciences. The life trajectories of people who live on the street and use drugs were analyzed. The methodological procedures applied were direct observation techniques, informal and formal interviews, and records in a field notebook. The theoretical support of material analysis takes the basis on authors as Habermas, Krohlberg, Goulejac, and Oliveira whose contributions were fundamental in this research. For the analytical reading of the specific situation of the street inhabitants and the privileged social actors in this investigation, three determining aspects were considered in the understanding of moral values: the singularity of the moral fact in the actions of the subject, the predominance of pragmatic and creative use of values and equivalent ones in everyday actions, and the ethical/moral issues in risky situations. Those aspects are crucial to understand the lives of people who live on the street, make use of drugs, and are in a situation of social vulnerability. The results show that in the perception of the subjects, ethical and moral values are constructed based on universal and singular perspectives that structure daily life in a scenario designed by dilemmatic, ambivalent, and conflictive situations. The people who participated in this investigation who live on the street and use drugs express ethical issues in the act of reflecting on their lifestyle and life expectancy. On the other hand, moral issues are detailed between the challenge of thinking about practice based on the universalization of values and the bet on overcoming thinking guided by egocentrism. The experience of drug use and life on the streets determines their actions anchored in the pragmatic use of the values they have as a reference.