Notes on the effects of the legal-alarmist approaches to substance use and toxicomania

Abstract

This work establishes a historical-reflective trajectory on the coinage of the drug addiction problem in the world, especially from the 19th century onwards, to understand the legal and social situation in Brazil of today in facing this issue. It is pointed out that the conservative discourse of alarmism about substance use has guided, directly or not, public policies about it. This same ideology presents itself as the maintainer of a sanctioning treatment of the drug and its user, guided by race and by the prohibition-punishment binomial, which seeks to undertake an erasure of the cultural and clinical dimensions of addiction. It is considered that policies in this direction have not been fully effective in mitigating the harmful effects of drug addiction, nor the violence associated with it; on the other hand, interventions based on the perspective of harm reduction prove to be counter-hegemonic resources for handling this complex phenomenon, with care and attention to human rights.