Abstract
This paper reviews some of the main research on drug law enforcement in Brazil since the 2006 Drug Law came into force, noting a clear and constant pattern of police and judicial focus directed at retail drug trafficking, decisively impacting current incarceration rates. It then examines the lack of understanding of the actual functioning of illicit drug markets by the criminal justice system, leading to judicial decisions not only ineffective for its declared purposes, but also counterproductive in terms of controlling illicit economies. O trabalho faz uma revisão de pesquisas sobre a aplicação da legislação de drogas no Brasil desde a vigência da Lei de Drogas de 2006, constatando que há um padrão nítido e constante de direcionamento da repressão policial e judicial ao pequeno varejo do tráfico, com reflexos decisivos nas taxas de encarceramento atuais. Em seguida, analisa a falta de compreensão do funcionamento real do mercado ilícito de drogas pelo sistema de justiça criminal, o que leva a decisões judiciais pouco eficientes para os fins que declaram, e contraproducentes em termos de controle da economia ilícita. <strong>Publisher's Note:</strong> This article has been published in both Portuguese and English. To download the Portuguese version, click the "Download" link and select "PDF (PT)". Este artigo foi publicado tanto em Inglês, como em Português. Para baixar a versão em Português, clique "Download" e depois selecione "PDF (PT)".
Highlights
The illicit drug market is a multifaceted, profitable one in Brazil
The violence resulting from such disputes, as well as from state repression, is part of everyday lives of thousands of people living in communities that are somehow regulated by this economic activity. The articles in this special edition of JIED focus on different aspects of this illegal market, including routes, prices, operating systems, and criminal organizations
Brazilian prisons are packed with criminals charged with small offenses, but this has negligible impact over drug trafficking operations
Summary
The illicit drug market is a multifaceted, profitable one in Brazil. The country of continental proportions shares borders with the major producing countries of plant-based drugs in the world and is itself a large consumer market (INCB 2016). Carried out almost 10 years after that first 2009 research, the findings were mostly the same: people convicted of drug charges were mostly first offenders, arrested in flagrante with small drug amounts This scenario shows a clear focus of public safety agencies on the retail drug market (Haber 2018: 30). The pattern around profiles, circumstance of arrests, and crime types indicate that the criminal justice system—represented by several actors, from the military police in charge of arrests to the superior courts—is undoubtedly focused on retail drug trafficking This trend is even more evident in two related research studies carried out independently in Rio de Janeiro (ISP 2016) and São Paulo (Sou da Paz 2018). The sole point of intersection between these two worlds is the small drug retailer—a disposable piece of the mechanism whose workforce is readily available and who serves as a scapegoat for the imaginary of judges, prosecutors, lawyers, and even the Brazilian society as a whole
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