The article discusses the rise of crack in Brazilian cities, the excessive admission of its users in the last decade and the media coverage. The analysis shows the link between the discourses legal, medical and media, in order to break up the epidemic scene that is established, featuring some elements that dispersed and contradictorily, solidify the issue. It also aims to suspend the names and truths that fill the character of the scene-object - profiled as young, poor, violent - and that so strongly, disappears on a script by exclusion.
crack; psychiatric hospitalization; media