RIO DE JANEIRO – Less than a mile from Maracana Stadium, where the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics will be staged Aug. 5, lies the most hopeless place imaginable.

Cars pass by a squalid sidewalk where Rio’s undesirables go to feed their cocaine habit. Prostitutes, some of them pregnant, sell their bodies for a couple of rocks of crack or a few reals, the equivalent of less than $5. Dozens of people ingest the drug in open view. No one pays much atten­tion.

These are the Cracklands, or Cracolandia, where drugs are the only currency that matters and lives are as expendable as the fleeting high from each hit of makeshift crack pipes.

“The Olympics? I’m happy it is coming,” one man says via translator. “More money for every­one.”

A friend of the man says his name is Joao. He is in his 40s and disabled after losing a leg in a motorbike accident, the payout of which he spends on his frequent trips to the Cracklands. Joao flips in and out of coherence, enough to explain how he’ll smoke so much tonight that it will keep him awake for five days, but seconds later he’s too out of it to answer when asked his name.

The Olympics mean tourists who will spend money and also leave behind trash. Discarded bottles and cans are collected and turned into cash at a recycling center.

“They take the money, and it goes straight to drugs,” says Celio Ricardo, a former addict-turned-church minister. “There are only two outcomes: prison or death. They are consuming themselves into a slow death. Their teeth will fall out, their skin will waste, their organs will shut down.”

Crack is readily available throughout the country. A 2012 survey by the University of Sao Paulo found that Brazil was second to the USA in crack consumption. Brazil shares 5,000 miles of border with Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, the world’s three biggest cocaine producers.

While the sale, transportation and cultivation of cocaine in Brazil is illegal, drug consumption was decriminalized in 2006 under a bill that promoted education and community service for users. “(A drug user) is more of a medical and social problem than a police problem,” Elias Murad, the congressman who sponsored the bill, said at the time.

“The authorities sometimes pick the addicts from the street and put them into shelters, but addicts escape and go back to the Cracklands,” Ricardo says. “The government cannot do much to hide them or keep them away.”

Ten-second highs

Rocks of crack are bought on the street for as little as $2, depending on its size, its quality and the reputation of the dealer. Dealers retreat to the shadows whenever an unfamiliar face arrives.

Users know the process well. A vendor sells a carton of water for 25 cents. The addicts don’t drink the water, because even in the sweltering heat and humidity their bodies feel no need for it.

Instead, they poke a hole in the top and empty the contents. They place a rock of crack, mixed with some cigarette ash, on the foil lid of the carton. They light it up and inhale sharply through the hole in the foil. The cup beneath fills with smoke, and the user breathes it in.

To those who are accustomed to it, the high lasts about 10 seconds. Then thoughts turn to where the next blast will come from and how to pay for it.

The air is thick with acrid chemicals. It gets in your throat and the back of your nose, not unlike having too much wasabi or horseradish, but with a far more bitter taste.

Marco, a man who looks to be in his mid-30s but, according to Ricardo’s group, is probably far younger, finds it amusing when he sees three visitors scrunch their noses at the raw fumes in the air.

Marco says he used to have a good job and a beautiful family. He worked as a supervisor for a company that provides waiters and waitresses to corporate events.

“The problem with this drug is that you can’t commit to anything or to time,” Marco says. “You end up missing commitments, and then you (are unemployable). You are on your own.”

Marco says he will smoke 10 to 15 rocks on this evening. His intake is dictated by whatever meager funds he has. “Everything I make I spend on crack,” he says.

‘They live among trash’

When Ricardo and a dozen assistants turn up with food, hearty meals of rice and stew heavy with calories for maximum nutrition, a line forms. The members of the Cracklands eat, but few seem to take pleasure in it.

“The drugs destroy their taste buds,” Ricardo says. “They can’t taste anything, so they eat rotten food from the trash. They live among trash. Then they smoke the drugs, which is the real trash.”

He should know. A few years ago, he was one of them, and so were all of his assistants at one time or another.

There is probably nothing sadder than the sight of children in this godforsaken area. USA ­TODAY Sports spent an hour at the site and saw no evidence of children using drugs or prostituting themselves.

But a group of curious 12-year-old girls gathers to see what is happening, chatting casually of what substances their parents are using.

It is hard to see how youngsters can escape from this if their parents are locked in a cycle of drug abuse and homelessness. Ricardo runs a nearby refuge for addicts but is forbidden from helping children because of government child abuse regulations.

By the food stand, Iagani, 20, describes her life as a beggar. Her begging takings increased, she says, as her pregnancy began to show. The father is a few streets away, sleeping under a bridge after a day-long drug binge.

Iagani heads off to find shelter — and a quiet place to use her remaining stash.

“I believe my baby will be OK,” she says. “God will protect my baby.”

Slipping from society

On this filthy pavement, packed against a crumbling wall and beneath the dim light of a flickering streetlamp, a bizarre kind of hierarchy seems to have emerged.

A prostitute, Josea, looks down on the bottle and can collectors as being undignified. Yet prostitution brings in little extra cash and is far more dangerous.

“Sometimes they trick us,” says another prostitute, 22-year-old Cristiane. “The men don’t like to use condoms. Sometimes they don’t pay us; they just give us drugs instead.”

Users compare their stashes and talk about where they will sleep tonight. They talk occasionally of the Olympics and liken it to the 2014 World Cup.

Back then, the streets and trash cans were awash with recyclable litter. One man boasts of collecting $30 of trash in a day. The flip side was that he had to stay up for 24 hours to rake in that much. To stay up that long, he smoked more crack than normal.

This is an anonymous place where people come to slip away from society. People disappear from here all the time, never to be seen or heard of again. Maybe they fixed their habit and got help. “In most cases, probably not,” Ricardo says.

It is long past midnight, and the church group is starting to wrap up, but things are still as active as ever and no one is thinking about sleep.

Ricardo gives a sad shake of his head as he moves to leave. There are other sites to go to, more people to help, or at least to pray for.

There have been attempts by the city to clean up the Cracklands, but the only effect was that the site of the drug taking shifted, deeper into the maze of streets, harder for the charitable groups to find.

As the church group moves off, Joao is talking once more, at a rapid pace. He boasts of how many rocks he has, placing them one by one into the hand of a visitor. “Ten!” he yells. “More than anyone here.”

He says the payout money means he will never go short of crack and will never have to collect cans. He says foreigners will come here during the Olympics to smoke with the locals — Americans, Argentineans, Europeans, he says, just like the World Cup.

He is relishing the attention, because for now, at least, he’s the man everyone is listening to in these tortured streets. There is nothing he doesn’t know about this place, and only one thing he won’t discuss.

“Where we buy the drugs, that is not revealed,” he says. “Only we know.”