Academic studies about the Cannabis Sativa

2009.06.28

The academic studies about the theme of cannabis as an illegal substance in the third world has followed two principal ways: those that study the effects of the consume of this substance on the user and the consequences of the consume on social relations; and another that proposes to comprehend the forms of criminal organization formed by the illegal commerce and its effects in the process of socialization and the increase of the violence taxes.

There are, however, other currents, that have less evidence in the academic studies : a research to comprehend the legalization process in the financial system of narco traffic money and the criminal networks that make legal the traffic money; the second studies the recreational use of cannabis, with other psycho active substances.

The two first directions are relevant, before everything, because of the importance of these subjects in the social reality of those countries. The social treatment give to this substance do not only let off the exploitation of cannabis potentialities (in medicine, in the production of fibers and bio-diesel, etc), as well as causes the marginalization of the consumers, the violence of the narco traffic and the criminal networks of those who are charged of making legal the money that comes from the illegal commerce.

The consequences of the legislation of cannabis in the third world are suffered by the people that have a lower social condition, submitted to the violence of the narco and the State by its way. So, the studies seek to show the questions referring to the sense that the criminalization of the consummation, plantation and production entail for those countries and the world.

According to these studies of the Brazilian philosopher and sociologist Paulo César Fraga, little attention in his country is done to the academic studies about violence in the regions of cultivation of plants considered illegal, as happens in the “Polígono da Maconha” (Polygon of Cannabis) in Brazil. According to Dr. Paulo Fraga, the difficulties for the scientific investigation are in the factors like the impossibility of a field research, because of being illegal, and the consideration that Brazil is not a country that has cultivation of this plant.

In the last years some studies have been developed, according to Fraga, about this question in Brazil, well guided in the representation of the cannabis plantation as an economic alternative in the places that do not have a defined agrarian politics, the new social relations that came from the institutionalization of the plantation and the violence that implies the plantation in certain locals.

Fraga work, in consequence, is a reflection of the experiences of investigations that have considered the specification and the diversification of the Polygon of Cannabis region in Brazil and comprehend how this case of plantation have mixed actors and can give shape for the institutionalization, going from the practice formed by the illegality.