Gilberto Gil is arrested for cannabis in Florianópolis

On 7 July 1976 police in Florianópolis detained Gilberto Gil, one of Brazil’s best-known singers, and his drummer, Francisco Edmundo Azevedo, in their hotel room. Gil was on tour with the Doces Bárbaros, the group he had formed with Caetano Veloso, Maria Bethânia and Gal Costa. Officers found about thirty cannabis cigarettes among his things.

A new kind of user

For half a century Brazilian doctors had described maconha as the vice of the poor and of the descendants of enslaved Africans. By the late 1960s magazines and newspapers were alarmed by something else: its spread among students and the well-off young. In 1970 the magazine Realidade ran the cover line “Maconha nas escolas”, marijuana in the schools. França reads Gil’s case as a sign of how little tolerance the authorities had for a youthful habit seen as imported, and perhaps subversive.

Arrest and sentence

The Folha de S.Paulo reported the arrest the next day. The police chief said the group had been watched since the previous night after a complaint about “strange cigarettes”, and that the two musicians laughed a great deal when caught. Two days later the paper reported that Gil, after a psychiatric examination, would be sent to an asylum for treatment, an artist’s drug use now being treated as a health matter.

	Gilberto Gil	Rita Lee
Arrested	July 1976, Florianópolis	August 1976
Sentence	One year of reclusion and a fine of fifty minimum wages	One year of reclusion
Served as	Treatment in a psychiatric clinic	House arrest

On 16 July the sentence was front-page news. The singer Rita Lee was convicted of possession the following month with a similar outcome.

A divided public

The cases were meant as a warning to the young. França argues that they had the opposite effect. They drew criticism from artists and intellectuals, gave the “fashion for maconha” great visibility and revealed an unexpected public tolerance. In Manchete magazine the mayor of Florianópolis, Esperidião Amin, guessed that eighty per cent of the city’s residents disapproved of the arrest. The police chief said he knew of many famous people who had committed the same offence, and the judge said he had been moved by the singer’s humility in admitting both the offence and the habit. Months later the Folha praised Caetano Veloso for using the affair to call for a mature debate about drugs.

In October 1976 Brazil passed Law 6.368, which again separated users from traffickers but punished both severely: six months to two years for possession for personal use, three to fifteen years for trafficking.^[1]