This article intends to approach the drug trade from the perspective of its capillary network in the social world and in urban weaves, using one of its trafficking points in São Paulo’s periphery as an "observation station". This is a descriptive (and analytic) perspective that allows us to consider criminal practices in relation to what could be defined as the illegality management, which is present in concrete every-day life administration practices. This is, indeed, the focus of the discussion: evidences of a growing and expansive mesh of illegalities (both old and new ones), their circuits and social networks, which are woven in urban practices and warped in the redefined relations among the illegal, the informal and the illicit. Based on the results of a recent research, the article aims to put an "experimental ethnography" into practice, in an attempt to find out the mediations and connections through which the movements of the boundaries between the legal and the illegal have been taking place. These connections and mediations must be well understood for they contain the key to identifying and understanding the porosity existent between the legal and the illegal, and the blurry boundaries among work, survival expedients and illicit practices. In them, one may identify and comprehend the capillary network of the drug trade in the social world, which is warped in the junctions and conjunctions of the urban weave.
Urban practices; Relations among the informal; the illegal and the illicit; Drug trade; Urban illegalities
