The K-drugs market keeps booming in Brazil despite alleged attempts by the First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC) to ban it, and the nature of the K-drugs business means that the veto helps control, but not stop, its sale.
K drugs are synthetic substances usually developed in local laboratories, with over 300 variations commonly known on Brazilian streets as K2, K4, K9, “spice,” or even “synthetic marijuana”, which it isn’t but is sold under the guise of. The raw materials for its production are legally imported from countries such as India and China and later diverted and mixed with other chemicals.
Widespread K drug use emerged in São Paulo’s prisons in 2019 and became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic, when bringing drugs into the prison from outside grew more difficult due to access restrictions. In recent years, the market for the drug has expanded beyond prison walls, mostly in São Paulo. Use of the drug was uncommon before its surge in prison popularity.
“There has been a huge rise in seizures that coincided with the 2020s, with a large number of events that we didn’t see in the 2010s,” Mauricio Yonamine, a specialist in forensic toxicology at the project INSPEQT, a collaboration between Brazilian universities and the country’s Federal and Scientific Police, told InSight Crime.
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The PCC was making a monthly profit of over 1 million reais (around $180,000) from K drugs between 2019 and 2020 inside the country’s prisons, according to São Paulo’s Public Ministry. The expansion of drug sales onto the streets raised the possibility of highly increasing the gang’s earnings.
But in late May 2025, the gang tried to prohibit sales. The downsides to selling it in certain spots exceeded profits for the PCC, as the effects of K drugs tend to attract police and ambulances to areas where its use is popular.
Some users had convulsions, hallucinations, fits of rage and aggression, and some died. In 2023, videos spread across Brazilian social media of K drugs users in a vegetative state, their bodies twisted and frozen where they stood, as if asleep while upright.
“It is similar in that it acts on the same region of the brain as marijuana, but it acts so much more intensely that the effects we see are quite different,” said Yonamine.
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Despite PCC’s strong hold on São Paulo’s criminal economies, the gang has not managed to ban the sale of K drugs completely. Instead, street sales have been pushed out of the city center into its outskirts. Not every region of the city has been subject to PCC veto.
Since the substance is not part of the major trafficking chains for cocaine and marijuana, and is produced by local actors, traffickers do not depend on the PCC as a broker for K drugs. This allows sales to continue despite the veto from the gang.
What the prohibition did achieve was to move the market away from Cracolândia (Crackland), a region in the center of São Paulo where high levels of drug use are concentrated, to other parts of the city.
This move likely helped to expand drug consumption into São Paulo’s eastern zone, an area also controlled by the PCC but not a drug hotspot as significant as Crackland. That suggests that the gang chose to enforce the ban solely in areas strategic to its operation, such as the city center.
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Crackland is close to the Moinho favela, a community that functions as a headquarters for PCC’s trafficking operations. Buildings in the favela have been used by the gang to store drugs for distribution, for example, which explains the PCC’s desire to keep authorities away.
This was not the first time that the PCC has tried to ban certain drugs to increase control. In the 2000s, the gang vetoed crack in prisons, for example. The intention was to maintain order inside prisons, as crack had exponentially increased homicides. However, its ban did not last long because the profits from crack proved more valuable than the consequences of its use.