PROHIBITION OF MARIJUANA: RACISM AND VIOLENCE IN BRAZIL

The article analyzes the most important illegal drug consumed in Brazil, marijuana, treated from the point of view of the history of its stigmatization as a plant associated with Afro-Brazilian traditions and, therefore, the target of racist prohibitionist medical campaigns from the early twentieth century. The history of marijuana in Brazil manifests itself in three different dimensions: that of industrial uses, that of medicinal uses and that of uses as a form of leisure, in clandestine contexts and of illicitness, and linked to mechanisms of coercion, repression and control of the popular subaltern strata, especially from a racial bias, evident in incarceration and homicide victims. Drug-related violence in Brazil is caused not by the pharmacological effects of illicit drugs, but by the context created by the prohibition that triggered a "war on drugs", the results of which are disastrous. The crisis of the prohibitionist paradigm at international level, with the legalization of marijuana in Uruguay, Canada and the USA, challenges Brazil to deabte legalization and regulation of this plant, which would reduce the damage caused by the violence of its prohibition and their clandestine traffic.