An anti–drug war ad campaign vanishes in Brazil

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An anti–drug war ad campaign vanishes in Brazil

11 June 2015

In Latin America, the continent that has suffered the brunt of the U.S.-led war on drugs, an emerging international reform movement contends that prohibition has failed to create safe, just, and healthy communities. As a recent New York Times article highlighted, governments across the region—in particular Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, and Uruguay—have begun to push back against U.S. policies like aerial eradication of coca and militarized repression of illicit substances.

However, in Brazil, the regional hegemon, a hardline approach to drug dealers, users, and producers retains widespread popular and political support. Reform advocates there argue that prohibition has caused the country the kind of social, economic, health, and governance harms seen elsewhere in the region. Yet “lock ’em up and throw away the key” continues to be the favored policy.

So one Rio de Janeiro organization, the Center for Studies on Public Security and Citizenship (CESeC), is trying a new approach to educate people about the drug war’s failures: public art.

In late April, CESeC launched an ambitious antiprohibition ad campaign. Da Proibição Nasce o Tráfico(“Trafficking Is Born of Prohibition”) consists of five comic book-style public service announcements placed on 40 city buses. Drawn by some of Brazil’s best-known artists, the cartoons concisely depict the irrational nature of the drug war in a frank yet easily digestible way.

One shows a tally of dead children drawn on the back of a heavily armed officer from Rio de Janeiro’s SWAT-style drug police, suggesting that more people die from drug-law enforcement than from drug use; another, playing on a Brazilian saying that refers to an impossible and interminable task, submits that ridding the world of drugs is like “trying to dry ice.”

The creative campaign, which ran for 30 days, received ample media attention and a mix of supportive and perplexed responses from bus riders in Rio. Though one bus driver commented to a local blog [Portuguese] that “legalization will increase crime, it isn’t going to fix anything,” there was, perhaps surprisingly, no political pushback.

But things played out differently in São Paulo.

Two days after the campaign’s April 27 launch in São Paulo, one of the world’s biggest cities, the state ordered the ads pulled from the buses. CESeC was given no warning of or reason for the decision. Repeated media inquiries to the state transportation authority, bus company, and governor’s office have gone unanswered.

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