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Social Effects of Prohibitionism in the Americas and New Drug Policies

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Drugs and Social Context

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Abstract

The prohibitionist complex is still powerful and multiform. Despite the evil it has been proved to unleash, avoiding it is a tough task. On the one hand, this article focuses on the persistence of prohibitionism in Uruguay and the violence (both statal and interpersonal) that it inflicts on the most vulnerable drug users. On the other hand, it discusses the historical reasons why Uruguay has to challenge the prohibitionist complex and describes the specific civilizing path that resulted from other efforts to modify drug policies. In Uruguay, alcohol and prostitution have historically been regulated and controlled by the State, with an approach that has privileged public health rather than moral considerations. By contrast, challenges to prohibitionism are more market-centered in the United States than in Uruguay. Prohibitionism is in decline in both cases, either by direct state action or by regulation through the production of a legal market and taxes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/cannabis-country/, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/01/world/americas/uruguay-lawmakers-to-vote-on-legalizing-marijuana.html

  2. 2.

    In the 1990s, during a neoliberal momentum in the region, the state monopoly on alcohol was repealed. During the parliamentary debate, progressivism defended the state monopoly of alcohol by arguing health protection. Senator Astori (current Minister of Economy and the main political orchestrator of the “progressive era” economic policy) pointed out at a Senate session on 24 October 1995, “It seems to us that what is at stake is a public or collective good. One of these the market cannot supply, so they must be generated by other means. I hold that control of an important part of public health is at stake, and this is a public good that the market does not ensure. I am going to support a good part of my argument on that subject, just as I did in the Constitution and Legislation Commission”. http://www.parlamento.gub.uy/sesiones/AccesoSesiones.asp?Url=/sesiones/diarios/senado/html/19951024s0056.htm

  3. 3.

    Cannabis users’ organizations have been advocates of total decriminalization and harm reduction for the use of all substances, but associations of family members of users of cocaine base (the first that took public voice was significantly called “Mothers of the square”) have held a position of desperate extreme abstentionism, with an understandably tutelary but not criminalizing imprint. The Facebook page of “Madres de la Plaza” proposed on 26 November 2014: “Compulsive hospitalization of addicts in public and private centers under the care of qualified staff, under the close supervision of mothers and relatives; eradicate from the streets all those who, victims of this terrible disease, have become a danger to themselves, their families and for the whole of society; we propose the creation of treatment centers, therapeutic communities, farms, and special spaces intended for the rehabilitation and physical and mental recovery of the sick.”

  4. 4.

    Pejorative term used to refer to cocaine paste users who stroll through streets, squares, and parks or spend the night sleeping rough.

  5. 5.

    In Latin America, “neoliberal governmentality ” has a negative meaning and it sound offensive to the experts: social technicians, educators, and volunteers from these forms of governmentality that Nikolas Rose characterizes as advanced liberal. Certainly, these focused types of attention to the most precarious subjects through short-term projects that also turn social work precarious are characteristic of neoliberal policies. Wacquant (2012, p 508) points out: “The terms ‘postsocial governance,’ ‘advanced liberal,’ and ‘late liberal’ are often used as synonyms for neoliberal.”

  6. 6.

    http://www.elpais.com.uy/informacion/indigentes-dia-son-detenidos-policia.html

  7. 7.

    During interviews with people imprisoned before 2002, the arrival of new prisoners, generally rakes, emerges as a topic. In general, the rakes are prosecuted by causes of trifle, thefts of small amounts related to the urgent need to obtain resources for use of cocaine base paste. There are also cases of cell phone thefts from pedestrians, sometimes threatened with small knives. Although this is a crime that has a penalty that imposes imprisonment, within the prison population those who make these small assaults are not considered professional thieves, but rakes. In a previous work, through an ethnographic scene we can see how a prisoner self-considered a criminal treats the other subject he considers just a “dirty.”

  8. 8.

    Technicians and authorities from the Ministry of Interior explained that the increase in the number of homicides, which soared in 2012, was due to “settlements” among people with criminal records, many of them linked to the market of illicit substances. In 2012, homicides increased by 34% compared to 2011. https://www.minterior.gub.uy/observatorio/images/stories/datos2012.pdf

  9. 9.

    http://www.elobservador.com.uy/barrios-montevideo-tasa-homicidios-similar-mexico-n671953 It is shocking to appreciate the rapid increase in violence in some regions of Mexico in parallel with the repressive push of the War on Drugs and the impunity and corruption of state institutions (Azaola 2012).

  10. 10.

    At the beginning of his presidential term, José Mujica, the president who enacted the laws of equal marriage, cannabis regulation, and abortion, proposed that cocaine base paste users would use military service or rural activities as a way to “get them out of their places and put them to do physical work” http://www.infobae.com/2010/03/26/507854-jose-mujica-propone-un-servicio-militar-los-adictos-al-paco

  11. 11.

    One of these therapeutic communities uses as therapy the total separation of adolescent drug users from their entire family for 3 months, the aim being to detoxify him/her and modify their relational familiar patterns. In an interview with a user’s grandmother, the interviewee pointed out to some family member that she had not complied with the treatment because she had celebrated the adolescent’s birthday, before that period. The teen eventually escaped from the place, which, of course, is a result of confinement that deprives a teenager of seeing their family for 3 months.

  12. 12.

    Faced with the proposed closure of psychiatric “colonies,” the public health workers’ union defended the continuity of these colonies, living museums of tutelary times in which locked-up citizens suffered all kinds of violence. In 2006, the new progressive government intended to close these colonies for a couple of years, a proposal the union opposed. In 2016, almost a decade later, the government has still not closed the colonies despite denouncing them. Today, as in 2006, the union opposes closure. On the other hand, two organizations of Pentecostal origin have communities in rural areas in which they deal with the “rehabilitation of addicts” by separation from their places of origin. http://www.espectador.com/sociedad/59632/msp-pretende-cerrar-las-colonias-psiquiatricas-etchepare-y-santin-carlos-rossi y http://ladiaria.com.uy/articulo/2015/8/en-transito/

  13. 13.

    http://www.elpais.com.uy/informacion/murio-paciente-mordido-perros-etchepare.html

  14. 14.

    http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1531397-la-justicia-declara-inconstitucional-castigar-el-cultivo-de-marihuana-para-consumo-personal

  15. 15.

    http://sociedad.elpais.com/sociedad/2014/01/19/actualidad/1390156784_083798.html

  16. 16.

    These concepts could be useful to think a strategic retreat from the prohibitionist complex. Sunkel (2006) and other Chilean scholars have used them profitably to think about the market-centric neoliberal dictatorship in Chile.

  17. 17.

    https://elpais.com/internacional/2016/09/30/actualidad/1475226573_805987.html

  18. 18.

    Currently, the prohibitionist complex is showing one of its most effective facets: the financial system. International financial regulations have forced Uruguayan banks to close the accounts of pharmacies that had decided to sell cannabis, making an additional difficulty for the Uruguayan model of regulation of cannabis. http://www.elobservador.com.uy/bancos-privados-empiezan-cerrar-cuentas-empresas-vinculadas-marihuana-n1104674

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  1. Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay

    Marcelo Rossal

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  1. Department of Psychology, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Brazil

    Telmo Mota Ronzani

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Rossal, M. (2018). Social Effects of Prohibitionism in the Americas and New Drug Policies. In: Ronzani, T. (eds) Drugs and Social Context. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72446-1_3

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