Dreams of diamba, day-to-day forms of control: a history of the criminalization of marijuana during the Republican Brazil

Abstract

 The book “Dreams of diamba, day-to-day forms of control: a history of the criminalization of marijuana during the Republican Brazil” is the result from the master’s thesis defended at the Postgraduate Program in History at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). The book contributes to the set of studies on cultural history as it analyses the narratives of the prohibition of marijuana and their legacy. It also allows us to think about the current limits for the development of a decriminalization policy that could open ways to the reception of the plant medicinal potential uses. The book contains three chapters that demonstrate how the dynamics of the prohibition of marijuana use and users occurred in the first half of the 20th century in Brazil. They also demonstrates how the actions developed by the Brazilian State and the Bahian press media were responsible for starting the control and the criminalization of users and uses of this practice. The book brings the hygienist and sanitary discourses as a basis which is strongly marked by the presence of doctors, and offers important analitical keys to the understanding the complex network that acted in the process of building the criminalization of marijuana in the Brazilian Northeast