A video went viral last week of a guy in Mexico buying soda in an Oxxo (like a 7-Eleven) when a bunch of guys dragged him off to forcibly intern him in a rehab. Comments expressed amazement that the abductors were not done for kidnapping, yet there is a huge network of barrio rehabs, known as anexos, which keep inmates against their will for years. Their detox methods include chaining the “addicts” up and making them stand in painful positions to rid them of their sins.
Anthropologist Angela Garcia has spent over a decade studying the anexos and has a new book “The Way That Leads Among The Lost” describing what she discovered. As she tells me in this CrashOut Chronicle, the anexos serve as a second function of keeping youths who are on the front lines off the streets so they might survive; this, indeed, is a key reason their mothers pay to lock them up.
I also talk with Angela about addiction in her homeland of New Mexico, especially the Española Valley, which has suffered the worst opioid use in all the United States. Long before Angela studied this at Stanford, she saw it in her own family and she gives a rare insight into the culture, which can include families from great grandparents to teenagers all using together.
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Rehabs That Lock Addicts Up For Years