The Paco Drug Scourge

When the New York Times published a page one story about the scourge of paco--smokeable garbage cocaine--sweeping through Buenos Aires's poor neighborhoods, the Argentine press went through its usual What-The-Foreigners-Said Como Nos Ven gymnastics, with both Perfil and La Nación weighing in with stories on the fact that, well, the New York Times wrote a story about Buenos Aires (I won't, of course, be so cynical as to note that Perfil and La Nación are thought of as oppostion newspapers--i.e. ones that publish information that makes the government looks bad--while pro-K papers like Clarín and Página/12 did not note the NYT article, at least as far as I could see.).

My reaction was one that I often have reading Argentine trend stories in U.S. newspapers. 1) I've heard this before and 2) There are a few small, irritating errors. I tossed out the first of these because, as a journalist who lives here, I follow the local press so of course by the time it makes the foreign papers it sounds like old news; the second I tossed aside because when a foreign correspondent flies in (if I'm not mistaken, the NYT writer lives in Rio) there's bound to be tiny faults (the article says, for example, that "...the deep financial crisis of late 2001 turned places like Ciudad Oculta into what are known here as villas miserias," whereas villas miserias existed as far back as the 1930s; the 2001 crisis just made them worse). Small things; no blood, no foul.

But then I read Slate writer Jack Shafer's Wednesday Press Box column, and I realized that I really had heard this before. Shafer, who was looking into the NYT piece as a nominee for his "Stupidest Drug Story of the Week" series, wrote the following:

The hell wrought on Argentina by the illicit drug "paco" has already become a journalistic staple. The Christian Science Monitor visited the topic on April 5, 2006; the Miami Herald on Aug. 12, 2006; the Los Angeles Times on May 25, 2007; and BBC News on Aug. 29, 2007.

The New York Times' contribution arrived on Feb. 23 and was published on Page One of the paper. But not only does the Times piece fail to advance the paco story, it plagiarizes two lines from the Herald.

Not intentional, I'm sure, more of a cut-and-paste than an ethical failing. But, er, whoops!