Marcha da Maconha

The Marcha da Maconha is the yearly march for the legalisation of cannabis in the cities of Brazil. It takes its date from the worldwide Global Marijuana March, but in Brazil the march itself became the question. For years judges banned it as apologia, the advocacy of a crime, and police broke it up, until the Federal Supreme Court ruled in 2011 that asking for a change in the law is not a crime.^[1][2]

It is a demonstration about a law, not a gathering for smoking. The court that protected it said so, and set the conditions under which it may be held.^[1]

Banners in the capitals

Marches on the international date were held in Rio de Janeiro from at least 2002. In 2007 members of Growroom, the largest Portuguese-language forum for cannabis growers, made a website and a visual identity under the name Marcha da Maconha, and called marches in a dozen state capitals for 4 May 2008.^[2][3] The march has kept that look: green banners with the name in large rounded letters, and placards against the “war on drugs”.

The form is simple. People gather at a square, walk a set route through the centre and end with speeches. In São Paulo the march leaves the open space under the MASP museum on Avenida Paulista. In 2015 police counted about 4,000 people walking to the Largo São Francisco, under the theme “for the freedom to use, legalisation and against the deaths”, with a six-metre paper joint carried along.^[4]

Banned as advocacy of a crime

In 2008 the marches were banned in most of the cities where they had been called. Judges gave grounds from advocacy of drug use to criminal association, and only Recife’s march went ahead with permission, amid arrests.^[2] The neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro writes that the repression made the movement grow.^[3]

The offence was old. The same charge of apologia had put the band Planet Hemp in jail for five days in 1997 for their songs. And the 2006 drug law, which ended prison for users, also made it a crime to induce or instigate anyone to use drugs.^[5]

In 2011 the conflict came to a head. In Rio de Janeiro, police held activists handing out leaflets in Lapa on suspicion of apologia until a court authorised the march for 7 May; during the march itself they used pepper spray and detained three people.^[6]

Two rulings in 2011

The Prosecutor General took the question to the Federal Supreme Court. On 15 June 2011, in the case known as ADPF 187, eight ministers ruled unanimously that the rights of assembly and free expression guarantee the marches, and that the Penal Code’s offence of apologia must be read so as not to block them. Justice Celso de Mello, whose vote the others followed, called the march a spontaneous social movement and said debating prohibition is not incitement.^[1]

The court also set limits. Justice Luiz Fux listed them: the march must be peaceful and unarmed, announced to the authorities in advance, must not encourage drug use, and “there can be no consumption of narcotics at the event”. Children and adolescents may not take part.^[1]

On 23 November 2011 the court finished the work in ADI 4274. The drug law’s offence of inducing drug use, it ruled, cannot be applied to demonstrations or debates about decriminalisation. Justice Ayres Britto put the distinction plainly: making drug use a crime is one thing, debating whether it should be is another.^[5]

	ADPF 187	ADI 4274
Decided	15 June 2011	23 November 2011
Law read down	Penal Code, Article 287 (apologia)	Drug law 11.343/2006, Article 33 §2 (inducing use)
Leading vote	Celso de Mello	Ayres Britto
Result	Unanimous	Unanimous

After the rulings

The rulings did not change what anyone may possess or grow. Ribeiro writes that they opened public space instead: once the marches were lawful, patients and families could speak openly, and stories of children with epilepsy treated with cannabis began to reach newspapers and television.^[3] The marches go on each year; Goiânia held its twelfth in 2024.^[7] In June 2024, thirteen years after it protected the march, the same court decriminalised possession for personal use.