Do ópio à maconha: aspectos da construção do estereótipo do século XIX e suas reminiscências na política criminal contemporânea

Abstract

It´s known, since the most remote times, the human beings that had always tried to modify the perception of the world through capable stimulus to provoke changes on the state of conscience. During different historical times, “drugs” had played a fundamental role in order to reaffirm the culture and identity of various societies, in which functioned as sacramental and divine, as well as occult and demoniac. Therefore, drugs have had primordial function on people´s lives as individuals or as part of a community in the civilization process. As time has passed, the stimulated practices were socially accepted because they were identified with the Divine, suffered restriction through prohibition by demoniac stigmas concepts. If by one side – the influence practiced in the Tupiniquins areas was considered “an elegant addiction” of opium, the apanage of white high European society – the other side -, the marijuana, or “the opium of the poor” came together with the enthusiasm of the African slave. The simple existence of blacks in Brazil, slave or free -, as well as their descendants, meant to have the burden of savagery and deprivety that was at risk of subvert the white civilization, with “drugs” from an unknown and unexplored culture, brought from distant lands, and therefore, demoniac. Since the moment that a strange agent brought up a new concept of morality in detriment of a known morality already stablished an intern and strange enemy, but sufficient to be restricted and destroyed – the “marijuana”, expiatory goat that very soon was submitted to the social control of a stigmatized power and punitive for the minority, in which has built in the social imaginary a pretext contention of the urban violence for the social category very specific, related to race, poverty, violence and to the delinquency. The state´s undiscriminated interventions, truculents, cruel and stigmatized , describes the addicted and small drug dealers as being an absolute harm to society, through a system that equalize the inequalities, putting them strongly to the edge of society, and promoting true human annihilations in the name of a schizophrenic and criminal moral. Perpetuating in the imaginary of contemporaneous societies the need of intervention of a bellicose and genocidal State, that shuts at the trenchwal the vunerable population, a State of permanent exception impose itself, where the exorbitant legalisms despise the democracy constitutionally consecrated in order to force obedience, abolishing fundamental rights dificultly conquered where the right to assured freedom, autonomy, private life, and intimacy – is the constitutive foundation not only from a State of Right , but of a Democratic State of Right