Brazil's Supreme Court decriminalizes marijuana

It's worth to remind, in the current Brazilian legislation, is not a crime. There was a new drugs law in 2006, that was aiming exactly on "decriminalization", somewhat similar to what Portugal did a few years ago back then.

It's considered only a misdemeanor to use drugs in Brazil.

The thing is, in the law, it never says how much of a drug is a crime or not. So you can already guess what end up happening.

The law in 2006 was so open, that what happened, was an increase of people arrested, and not a decrease.

So in my opinion, this is a complete valid from Supreme Court, because there is a legal problem with how the lower courts are judging here. The decision from Supreme Court is actually because of a man that was convicted in São Paulo Court, with 3 grams (!).

Fun fact: The 2006 law doesn't even mention which drug is a drug. It says that Anvisa (Brazil FDA) is that classify that.

So if a President really want to make it LEGAL, they could just nominate liberal names on Anvisa, and suddenly, Anvisa could classify weed and other drugs as non-dangerous, and it would be legal to even sell it...

Another fun fact: in 2000, by mistake, ANVISA removed a poppers drug (Chloroethane) from the drugs that was banned.... So for a few weeks, it was completely legal Chloroethane. And a guy end up being released from prison because of this!

I had a friend get charged with cultivation in 1982 for 200 female plants.

His lawyer called in lots of witnesses that Geoff smoked a _lot_ of dope, and that it was for personal use. He also presented a petition with nearly half his village saying it was personal use, as he really smoked a _lot_ of dope. He also helped anyone with any task, and was a generally loved person, not a drug crazed maniac, but very very chill.

He was fined for personal use. This was Australia, not Brazil, but Judges are supposed to use discretion. The only problem is when discretion is code for prejudice, not justice.

Meanwhile in Australia there appears to be zero chance of marijuana being legalized any time in the future.

So of course the young people who want to get high go to the bikies and get methamphetamine instead. The politicians don’t give a shit.

Australia really is an incredibly conservative country.

See https://archive.is/20240626025842/https://www.bloomberg.com/... for the whole text.

When I only read the headline at first, I thought: the object level decision sounds good, but I'm worried this went via the judges, not lawmakers.

Funny enough, when I open the article, I see that Brazil's President of Senate had exactly the same complaint.

Something curious from the article:

> Brazilian drug law states that it is a crime to buy, keep, transport or bring drugs for personal use, in this case with a light penalty. Each judge can decide what quantity or amount of marijuana is consistent with personal use or drug trafficking. According to top judges that vote in favor of the decriminalization, this perception reinforces bias, especially against poor and Black people.

I would like to see the original quote from the judge here. I doubt the original talked about 'Black people' the same way that (translated) phrase would be understood by an American audience.

EDIT: https://www.dw.com/en/brazils-supreme-court-decriminalizes-m... gives the name of the judge.

> Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes said these existing laws disproportionately harm "young people, especially Black people, who are treated as drug traffickers for possessing small amounts."

So let's see if that's enough to dig up the original quote in Brazilian.

Another update: https://www.poder360.com.br/justica/leia-frases-de-moraes-so... has was it likely the source of the English phrase:

> Ao defender sua posição, o magistrado escreveu, por exemplo, que “os jovens, em especial os negros (pretos e pardos), analfabetos, são considerados traficantes com quantidades bem menores de drogas (maconha ou cocaína) do que os maiores de 30 anos, brancos e portadores de curso superior”.

The important bit here being 'negros (pretos e pardos)'. A literal translation for 'negros' would indeed by 'blacks', but I wonder what the exact connotations in Brazil are.

Wikipedia has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Brazilians

The whole article is interesting, but here's something relevant to US cultural influence:

> According to Edward Telles,[22] three different systems related to "racial classification" along the White-Black continuum are used in Brazil.[23] The first is the Census System, which distinguishes three categories: branco (White), pardo, and preto.[23] The second is the popular social system that uses many different categories, including the ambiguous term moreno (literally meaning "tanned", "brunette", or "with an olive complexion").[24] The third is the Black movement, which distinguishes only two categories, summing up pardos and pretos ("blacks", lowercase) as negros ("Blacks", with capital initial), and putting all others as "whites".[25] More recently, the term afrodescendente has been adopted for use,[26] but it is restricted to very formal discourse, such as governmental or academic discussions, being viewed by some as a cultural imposition from the "politically correct speech" associated with the United States.

> Sociologist Simon Schwartzman points out that to "substitute negro for preto, suppressing the pardo alternative would mean to impose unto Brazil a vision of the racial issue as a dichotomy, similar to that of the United States, which would not be true."[41]

I think it is a major shift in drug policy in Brazil

From what I've heard about the levels of police corruption and institutional incompetence in Brazil, i'll make a prediction based on what I've seen happen in Mexico (with similarly corrupt police and similarly inept institutions). The government decriminalizes the substance in some specified way, public platitudes are made about this widely known legal change, and police, on the streets, interacting with random people, continue to arrest them flagrantly for possession of any amount of marijuana out of sheer corrupt inertia until their victims cough up a bribe to avoid the tedious and sometimes dangerous process of being in custody and under blatantly false or at least ambiguously glued-up criminal charges. And so it goes, crap without end, Amen.

Mexico didn't just decriminalize it either, the country's supreme court outright, definitively legalized recreational consumption and possession of marijuana in 2021, but because of a blend of dishonest law enforcement, state-level legal inertia and lack of clearly defined regulatory follow-through, and extremely ambiguous enforcement procedures, people, to this day, regularly get arrested and charged with possession, even of very small amounts.

My main point: a media-friendly formal announcement of a certain new legal freedom in many countries (particularly developing countries with shitty, half-functional institutions) often widely fails to show meaningful improvements on the ground for years afterward.