DRUG LEGALIZATION

a socially responsible option for human rights

Abstract

This article proposes a debate on human rights by understanding the process of legalizing and regulating drugs as a socially responsible attitude within a historical-structural need to reshape the processes of understanding about drug relations, directly linked to poverty, blackness and violence. It aims to broaden the growing debate on anti-prohibitionist issues and to understand the process of decriminalizing subjects via anti-prohibitionist policy. It is an excerpt from a descriptive and qualitative study, with an analytical approach, in the light of the Critical Discourse Analysis (ACD) aimed at drug prohibitionism in Latin America. In this perspective, it is urgent, in addition to legalizing and regulating drugs considered illegal, to create a massive human rights education campaign in various spheres on drugs, as well as changes in the educational training of police officers, encouraging equal approaches by people, regardless social status, ethnicity or housing condition. It was observed that the anti-drug policy does not have drugs as its main combat interest, but rather the poor and non-white populations. In this way, the fight against social and racial prejudice is essential in the process of reconstructing and recoding our history, our cultures and our worldviews.