Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: WELLINGTON WANDERLEY BARROS JUNIOR

THE BANKRUPTCY OF THE “WAR ON DRUGS”: a perspective on the biopolitics of criminalization and the 
tools for the propagation of racial violence by the State.

Drug trafficking; war on drugs; criminal policy; prohibitionism; punitive expansion.

Drugs are a fundamental part of human culture and history, present in all parts of the globe for millennia as instruments of socialization, a perennial and adaptable cultural phenomenon. Over the last two centuries, these psychoactive substances had their social, economic and legal value expanded, while some of them were considered a fundamental problem of society. Although confronting this problem is declared to be the definitive solution to a large part of the violence and structural problems of society, a power structure inherited from colonialism is hidden behind this facade, whose projects of control, separation and subjugation are carried out daily through of the state apparatus, especially public security. Using Foucault's concepts of biopolitics and starting from a historical analysis of drugs in contemporary times, we seek to expose the formation of the prohibitionist paradigm, the negative consequences of repression and to evaluate, from experiences of foreign law, which less repressive alternative approaches can represent a solution to the violent police state in which Brazilian society finds itself.