The narcotics commission publishes Brazil's case against maconha

In 1953 Brazil’s national narcotics commission, with the health ministry’s sanitary education service, published Maconha: coletânea de trabalhos brasileiros. It gathered 31 Brazilian studies of diamba, as cannabis was then often called, written since 1915. Its editors, the doctors Roberval Cordeiro de Farias and Irabussu Rocha, presented it as the record of a successful campaign: thanks to education and repression, they wrote, use had never spread beyond the poorest and least informed classes.

The doctors’ case

The campaign began with Rodrigues Dória’s paper of 1915, which blamed the habit on enslaved Africans and called it their revenge on the people who had enslaved them. His followers built on it. Iglésias in 1918 described smoking circles in Maranhão. In 1924 Pernambuco Filho and Botelho warned that diamba might become a fashionable vice of the rich, and in 1925 Pernambuco Filho told the Geneva opium conference that in Brazil maconha was more dangerous than opium.

França describes the essays as impressionistic: built on a few cases chosen without clear criteria, on foreign literature and sometimes on the authors’ own servants. Together they set out three charges that lasted for decades: laziness, crime and madness.

The laws that followed

The doctors, many of them public officials, pressed for laws, and got them.

Year	Measure
1921	Law 4.294 punishes trade in cocaine and opiates, but not cannabis
1932	Decree 20.930 lists Cannabis indica among the narcotics
1938	Decree 891 makes addiction a notifiable disease, with compulsory internment
1940	Penal Code article 281: one to five years of reclusion
1941	Decree-law 3.114 creates the national narcotics commission

The doctors still complained. Growers in the interior did not know that cannabis was illegal, enforcement was patchy, and critics argued that article 281 did not clearly punish the user. By the 1950s, though, Cordeiro de Farias was confident. In a report published by the United Nations in 1955 he wrote that maconha was not a serious social problem in Brazil, thanks to constant vigilance, while recommending more education, the systematic destruction of plantations and a register of Afro-Brazilian religious groups.

A lone dissent

In 1959 the anthropologist Alceu Maynard Araújo called the whole picture a myth that survived because the police had an interest in it. França notes that his was an isolated voice. The image of the maconheiro as idle, criminal and mad shaped Brazilian opinion and law until the 1980s, and in 1968 the military government punished users like traffickers.^[1]