“Museum of big novelties” The new-old Brazilian anti-drug policy

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the recent changes in the legal-normative and guiding apparatus in the field of alcohol and other drugs in Brazil. It’s a documentary research, with a qualitative approach, addressing Decree 9.761, that approves the new National Policy on Drugs (PNAD), and the new Drug Law (LD - nº 13.840). A Thematic Content Analysis was made, with the results organized in three axes that synthesize the analytical categories extracted during the process: (1) drugs as "evils" and an Antidrug Policy: combat and abstinence; (2) commodification, privatization and psychiatrization of health: the centrality of Therapeutic Communities (CTs) and the return of psychiatric hospitals; (3) inconsistencies between PNAD, LD and other guiding or normative instruments. It’s not a "new" policy on drugs, in the sense that rescues and reinstitutionalizes historical principles and modes of understanding and acting on the phenomenon of drugs and the relationship between people and drugs contradictory to the policies and assumptions from the Sanitary and Psychiatric Reforms, and, more specifically, the field of alcohol and other drugs, such as Harm Reduction. Therefore, it’s a "new" policy already born old; a museum of great news.

Keywords: Drugs. Mental health. Psychiatric reform. Psychiatric counter-reform. Policies.