Brazil Joins Ranks of Drug Reform Nations, Users t
Brazil Joins Ranks of Drug Reform Nations, Users to Avoid Jail Under New Law
After a ten-year struggle, the Brazilian Congress has adopted drug reform legislation that will keep small-time drug offenders out of prison while increasing penalties for major drug traffickers. Instead of prison sentences, recreational drug users will face less serious alternative punishments and will be treated not as criminals, but as persons needing medical or psychological help.
The move got the go-ahead in December from President Henrique Fernando Cardoso, and the Brazilian House responded in the last days of 2001 by passing the legislation, which had been languishing in the Brazilian congress since 1991. The bill is the government's response to a rapid increase in cocaine consumption in the nation of 170 million, and to widespread social acceptance of marijuana use.
"Smoking marijuana is not a crime," said Gen. Paulo Roberto Uchoa, who head's Brazil's National Antidrug Secretariat. "A drug user is someone who needs counseling and information. The ones who traffic drugs are the criminals," he told the Christian Science Monitor last week.
The move puts Brazil in line with a global trend toward more lenient treatment of drug users, a trend particularly pronounced in Europe, where Belgium, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland have all moved in that direction in recent years. But it also makes Brazil the only country in the Americas to adopt drug reform legislation. Fearing the wrath of a United States strongly committed to prohibitionist law enforcement responses to drug use and the drug trade, other Latin American countries have been loath to enact similar reforms.
"A drug user is not a case for the police, he is a drug addict," said Congressman Elias Murad, who led the decade-long legislative struggle. "He's more of a medical and social problem than a police problem, and that's the way the thinking is going, not just here in Brazil, but around the world," he told the Monitor. "We believe that you can't send someone to jail who is ill."
Skeptical observers might suggest that Murad has more than altruistic motives in pushing the legislation, which would send some drug offenders to treatment or rehabiliation. Murad, a physician, runs a chain of 50 drug prevention and rehabilitation centers in his home state of Minas Gerais.
Under Murad's bill, first-time drug possessors will not face prison time, but will instead be sentenced to treatment, community service, fines or license suspension. Under the old law, possession of one joint or one pound of cocaine could result in a prison sentence of from six months to two years. Like the old statute, the new law makes no distinction between hard and soft drugs. Unlike the old statute, however, it removes prison sentences for non-drug traffickers.
A decade ago, cocaine was seen primarily as a transit drug, shipped through Brazil on its way to Europe or the United States, but domestic cocaine consumption increased throughout the 1990s. Last year, the United Nations Office of Drug Control and Crime Prevention estimated that 900,000 Brazilians had tried cocaine, while reports of crack cocaine trafficking in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo have increased dramatically.
Marijuana is so popular in Brazil that it is smoked openly on the country's beaches and in bars and discos, the Monitor reported. According to a recent study by the World Health Organization, 80% of young people in Sao Paulo reported knowing someone who smoked pot. Still, the weed remains controversial. In November, popular Brazilian TV personality Sonia "Soninha" Francine, lost her job on TV Cultura after she appeared on the cover of the magazine Epoca underneath the headline "I Smoke Marijuana."
The Epoca story was one of a series of recent articles on the clash between popular mores and conservative cultural values surrounding marijuana use in Brazil. The popular weekly Veja ran a story entitled "My Dad Smokes Pot With Me," and another story in which a Sao Paulo city official called for debate on the medical use of marijuana.
Francine, the country's top female soccer commentator and a former MTV host, remained unrepentant in the wake of being sacked. "I am not a pothead; I am the same person I was before," she told the Brazilian talk show Join Us. "But the fact that a person consumes a substance should not turn that person into a criminal, even if that substance is bad for their health," she said.
The Francine affair prompted former Brazilian drug czar Judge Walter Maierovitch to criticize Brazil's drug policy stance. "Brazil is moving in the opposite direction of modern approaches," he told Reuters in November. "What predominates is prohibition and bad information," he said.
Although Francine lost her job, her relatively lax treatment is an indicator of the rapid changes in Brazilian attitudes toward marijuana. Only four years ago, Brazilian authorities arrested the members of the band Planet Hemp, not for marijuana use, but for their pro-marijuana lyrics. Police literally grabbed the band members as they exited stage following a concert in Sao Paulo in November 1997 (http://www.drcnet.org/wol/020.html#brazil).
Despite the passage of the new law, Maierovitch has not changed his tune. In a December interview with Reuters, he said the policy is inspired by US anti-drug policy, but will be doomed to failure without heavy spending on US-style drug prevention campaigns. "This is a parody of a policy, a badly made draft of what should be an anti-drug policy," said Maierovitch.
Even so, the new law will have an immediate impact on Brazil's overcrowded and notoriously violent prisons. (In the latest round of prison violence, at least 30 prisoners died in fighting and rioting at the Urso Branco Penitentiary in the western state of Rondonia on January 2.) According to Brazilian prosecutor Ricardo de Oliveira Silva, the new law could reduce new prison admittances by one-third.
In enacting the new law, the Brazilian government is in some ways only adapting the legal system to social reality. According to the Christian Science Monitor, police in many Brazilian states had already been using their discretion to warn small-time drug users instead of charging them.
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