August 20, 2019

What the censorship of a research says about Brazil's war on drugs

topic:	Freedom of Expression
located:	Brazil
editor:	Ellen Nemitz

A research made by Fiocruz (Oswaldo Cruz Foundation) says that 3.2 percent of Brazil's population had used illegal drugs in the 12 past months by 2015. Marihuana was the most used drug, followed by powder cocaine. Crack cocaine, which is probably the main target of the war on drugs due to "cracklands", was used once in a lifetime by only 0.9 percent of the population.

Even though the coordinator of research, Francisco Inácio Bastos, explains in a report published by Fiocruz that crack cocaine use is a public health problem, especially because the study does not consider people living on the streets, these data point to a use of illegal drugs that is smaller than alcohol, which has been used at least once in a lifetime by more than a half of the population.

The researchers had interviewed around 17 thousand people aged 12 to 65 between May and October 2015 using a methodology similar to that of a National Survey by Continuous Household Sample, used for social and economic development measurement. The results were censored. Osmar Terra, Minister of Citizenship, alleges that the methodology was wrong. According to specialists, though, the censorship was due to the fact that its results go against government goals: the war on drugs to fight “a drug epidemic”.

On August 2019, the results were released to be published following an agreement between Fiocruz and the government. However, this episode alone does not represent the entire problem regarding the deepening war on drugs. Recently, a decree signed by president Jair Bolsonaro has excluded harm reduction and established abstinence as the only purpose of drug treatments. Alongside this, the financing of therapeutic communities has increased, weakening the Psychosocial Attention Net, which was created to humanise treatments for drug users and people with mental health disorders – in Brazil, therapeutic communities are linked to the evangelical churches and many inspections have pointed to serious human rights' violations.

Harm Reduction began in Brazil in the 1980s in Santos, in the coast of São Paulo, focusing on syringe disposal to avoid HIV spread among injectable drug users. Today, it is is much more than that. During the VII International Congress of ABRAMD, held in Curitiba, Brazil, on June 2019 to discuss drug policy and harm reduction experiences, a speech from a woman who experienced drug use, prison and all violence from this context stood out: “Society has said to me that as a woman and drug user I had to die. Harm reduction said ‘you deserve to live’ and rescued everything taken from me. With harm reduction, the person is visible”.

Professor Carl Hart, an American psychologist and one of the most important researchers on drug abuse and addiction, opened the ABRAMD Congress. He argued that the war on drugs is a racist policy designed to kill and incarcerate black people – 67 percent of people in prison are black and 75 percent of violent killers take black lives away, according to Brazilian statistics. Raull Santiago, co-founder of Coletivo Papo Reto, an independent communication media company from Complexo do Alemão, a community in Rio de Janeiro, agrees: “The incarceration we are live through is having police presence as a main public policy for ‘favelas’. It is the devaluation of these spaces. It is to concentrate black and peripheral people massively in the prison system, but also to incarcerate these people inside their own reality”.

Asked about why Brazil, and also the United States, tend to reestablish the war on drugs, Carl Hart affirmed, “We are going back to the past in part because of white anxiety. White people in the United States are fearful that they will lose something for people who do not look like them. So they support politicians like Trump and Bolsonaro because they reassure the population that things will not change”.

Contents from VII International Congress of ABRAMD and interview with Carl Hart were produced by Ellen Nemitz for Parana Regional Council of Psychology. Reproduction was authorized.

Image: Gettyimages