A ilusão do controle das drogas: guerra às drogas e economia política do controle social

Abstract

This present thesis confronts the theme of social control in the war on drugs. In its methodological path, which combines bibliographic and documental techniques with dialecticity anchored in the empirical (general method), it retakes the discussion around the concept of social control to evaluate its heuristic potential for analyzing the researched object (social control of drugs). When carrying out a national diagnosis based on the literature review (penalism and criminology), and noting the absence of a consolidated debate, it proposes a problematizing approach, in a negative (deconstruction or criticism of social control) and positive (reinvention or revisited social control) dimension in the face of particularities of the situated context. In this way, it seeks to boost the sociological oxygenation of critical criminology (referent), from an interactionist-materialist perspective (specific methodology) open to interdisciplinarity, forging a conceptual approach based on power relations (intersectional social control), from Mead to Marx & Foucault (and Mbembe), from contributions of gender, race and class and, consequently, on hierarchies of neoliberal capitalism and on the bonds of global dependence. Prohibitionism is taken as a case of study, given the need to cut and its unique relevance for understanding criminal and social issues. When questioning the impact of the production relations of the Brazilian social structure on the articulation of strategies for the social control of drugs (problem), tests the hypothesis – which, in light of the political economy of punishment, leads to believe that they are consistent with the transformations of the hegemonic mode of production –, and indicates its developments (objective general), dividing the investigation into four moments (specific objectives): initially (1st chapter), the limits of the legal field for understanding the phenomenon and the role of the hegemonic vision built in research on drug consumption, production and trade in Brazil for the maintenance of a security and defensive “academic collaborationism” are questioned, drawing up, in reaction, the guidelines for a (critical) sociocriminology on drugs and social control; then (2nd chapter), the debate around social control is reconstructed, proposing an updated reading on the subject, for then (3rd chapter) to situate social control in the scope of the critique of political economy, historicizing it in the Brazilian social structure and in its mode of production and, finally, the development of Brazilian-style prohibitionism, in both aspects, as much internationally as domestically, from the colony to democracy; and, finally, but not least (4th chapter), the microphysics and macrophysics of the war on drugs are unveiled, as a way of understanding the dimensions of the power relations that underlie (and which) strategies for the social control of drugs in the current stage of capital accumulation in the country and, as a background issue, the very meaning of “failure” (and the “alternatives” proposed to it) of war on drugs. It is intended, in the final analysis, to build criticism advocating the horizon of a political economy of social control of drugs, proposing a re-discussion of the metaphor or war in the light of the sovereignty of capital. It is a possible intellective effort for an emancipatory understanding and transformation of the social reality of the peripheral crowd that is the priority target of bio and necropolitical strategies in the social order.