Brazil's Supreme Court decriminalizes marijuana
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
It's considered only a misdemeanor to use drugs in Brazil.
The thing is, in the law, it never says how much of a drug is a crime or not. So you can already guess what end up happening.
The law in 2006 was so open, that what happened, was an increase of people arrested, and not a decrease.
So in my opinion, this is a complete valid from Supreme Court, because there is a legal problem with how the lower courts are judging here. The decision from Supreme Court is actually because of a man that was convicted in São Paulo Court, with 3 grams (!).
Fun fact: The 2006 law doesn't even mention which drug is a drug. It says that Anvisa (Brazil FDA) is that classify that.
So if a President really want to make it LEGAL, they could just nominate liberal names on Anvisa, and suddenly, Anvisa could classify weed and other drugs as non-dangerous, and it would be legal to even sell it...
Another fun fact: in 2000, by mistake, ANVISA removed a poppers drug (Chloroethane) from the drugs that was banned.... So for a few weeks, it was completely legal Chloroethane. And a guy end up being released from prison because of this!
His lawyer called in lots of witnesses that Geoff smoked a _lot_ of dope, and that it was for personal use. He also presented a petition with nearly half his village saying it was personal use, as he really smoked a _lot_ of dope. He also helped anyone with any task, and was a generally loved person, not a drug crazed maniac, but very very chill.
He was fined for personal use. This was Australia, not Brazil, but Judges are supposed to use discretion. The only problem is when discretion is code for prejudice, not justice.
Out of curiosity, why? (Not a big weed guy.)
A really heavy smoker can consume up to several grams a day. Let's say 5 grams, that'd be 150g per month (5oz per month).
Agree that it's hard to argue for 200 plants being personal use; 20 would be more realistic. For 200 plants, it's a big operation! Also, you can grow them in like 3-month cycles too.
But I think a more reasonable explanation is they were trying multiple different strains or growing conditions. They may expect to toss out a fair bit of sub par pot.
Probably all what they said was factually true and still they may be worried that without him it would be harder to get weed in the village
So of course the young people who want to get high go to the bikies and get methamphetamine instead. The politicians don’t give a shit.
Australia really is an incredibly conservative country.
You can never know what the future holds in store.
When I only read the headline at first, I thought: the object level decision sounds good, but I'm worried this went via the judges, not lawmakers.
Funny enough, when I open the article, I see that Brazil's President of Senate had exactly the same complaint.
Something curious from the article:
> Brazilian drug law states that it is a crime to buy, keep, transport or bring drugs for personal use, in this case with a light penalty. Each judge can decide what quantity or amount of marijuana is consistent with personal use or drug trafficking. According to top judges that vote in favor of the decriminalization, this perception reinforces bias, especially against poor and Black people.
I would like to see the original quote from the judge here. I doubt the original talked about 'Black people' the same way that (translated) phrase would be understood by an American audience.
EDIT: https://www.dw.com/en/brazils-supreme-court-decriminalizes-m... gives the name of the judge.
> Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes said these existing laws disproportionately harm "young people, especially Black people, who are treated as drug traffickers for possessing small amounts."
So let's see if that's enough to dig up the original quote in Brazilian.
Another update: https://www.poder360.com.br/justica/leia-frases-de-moraes-so... has was it likely the source of the English phrase:
> Ao defender sua posição, o magistrado escreveu, por exemplo, que “os jovens, em especial os negros (pretos e pardos), analfabetos, são considerados traficantes com quantidades bem menores de drogas (maconha ou cocaína) do que os maiores de 30 anos, brancos e portadores de curso superior”.
The important bit here being 'negros (pretos e pardos)'. A literal translation for 'negros' would indeed by 'blacks', but I wonder what the exact connotations in Brazil are.
Wikipedia has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Brazilians
The whole article is interesting, but here's something relevant to US cultural influence:
> According to Edward Telles,[22] three different systems related to "racial classification" along the White-Black continuum are used in Brazil.[23] The first is the Census System, which distinguishes three categories: branco (White), pardo, and preto.[23] The second is the popular social system that uses many different categories, including the ambiguous term moreno (literally meaning "tanned", "brunette", or "with an olive complexion").[24] The third is the Black movement, which distinguishes only two categories, summing up pardos and pretos ("blacks", lowercase) as negros ("Blacks", with capital initial), and putting all others as "whites".[25] More recently, the term afrodescendente has been adopted for use,[26] but it is restricted to very formal discourse, such as governmental or academic discussions, being viewed by some as a cultural imposition from the "politically correct speech" associated with the United States.
> Sociologist Simon Schwartzman points out that to "substitute negro for preto, suppressing the pardo alternative would mean to impose unto Brazil a vision of the racial issue as a dichotomy, similar to that of the United States, which would not be true."[41]
Some said the same about the US Supreme Court ending criminalization of gay marriage, but no one today has a problem with it other than actual homophobes.
Court decisions often limit or strike down laws, but for some reason it's always a problem when doing so increases human rights. We should welcome more rights however they are earned. Many have had to be won through blood and destruction, I am thankful whenever that isn't necessary.
Huh, who says that?
I just want, ideally, democratically elected lawmakers to make an actual law explicitly spelling out things. Because what a judge cobbles together, another judge can take away. (Yes, I know there's 'precedent' in some legal systems. But that just means that the next judge needs to come up with some reasons why her new case is sufficiently different. Not that hard.)
(Btw, I'm not even talking about what rules I agree with or not. Eg Americans really like their state-owned mail service. So in that particular area, democracy is delivering what the people want, whether I like it or not.)
The proper way to do this may be via constitutional amendment, perhaps regularly. But the structure of the constitution makes it difficult to do regular amendment and changes.
Also, just as Judges can change their interpretation of the law for the better, they can also do the reverse. It would be better for example, if abortion rights was made more explicit or made outright a right guaranteed by the constitution.
Yes, I agree about the possibility of reversal!
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At the risk of going on a tangent:
There's some argument to be made that eg foreign policy is best handled at the federal level, but other things like rules on acceptable levels of noise or the schedule for garbage collection should be handled my more local authorities. It's easy to see that eg Florida has very different concerns about garbage rotting away in the hot weather compared to Alaska perhaps worrying about attracting polar bears?
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
> Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as "the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level".[1] The concept is applicable in the fields of government, political science, neuropsychology, cybernetics, management and in military command (mission command). The OED adds that the term "subsidiarity" in English follows the early German usage of "Subsidiarität".[2] More distantly, it is derived from the Latin verb subsidio (to aid or help), and the related noun subsidium (aid or assistance).
If you care about local self rule and subsidiarity at all, rules on abortion are something that should probably be handled by perhaps the counties or at most the states.
Compare also how things like education, traffic rules and manslaughter are handled by the states.
Curiously enough, Germany handles rules on abortion with an explicit law at the federal level, most other healthcare regulations being done at the state level. I wonder what the history there is. Perhaps it wasn't historically seen as particularly related to healthcare?
In any case, I agree that an explicit rule on abortion on any level is probably better than just relying on judges.
Laws can't and shouldn't handle every case explicitly, and it's good to have judges. But if you have an issues that's so politically prominent, it makes sense to give it an explicit rule.
Btw, do we have any sources / evidence for whether the confederacy only believed that specific point for the specific question of whether the states or the union should decide about slavery?
Or did they also have differences in opinion from the northerners on eg the role of municipalities and counties in educational policy or monetary questions etc?
I can hardly think of a human right more important and fundamental and universal than the right not be murdered.
Going on a tangent here, but one reason is that the law predates both the federal states (in their current form) and healthcare regulations.
The relevant paragraph 218 StGB dates back to the creation of imperial law in the German Empire of 1871 and was later carried over by the successor states. Compulsory health insurance as a cornerstone of the federal healthcare system was mandated by Bismarck some 12 years later. (140 years ago, and some countries still dont have that, smh)
But you're also right in that it wasn't made in the context of healthcare, but is actually a (priviledged) case of homicide law - which is obviously federal.
It's got a quite interesting history really. I don't know how well this translates, but if you're curious, here's some in-depth info: https://www.bpb.de/shop/zeitschriften/apuz/290795/kurze-gesc...
That's only 'obviously federal' in Germany. In eg the US manslaughter and murder are handled by the states.
It is in fact technically still illegal, with some formal exceptions to punishment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Germany
It is, the right of security in your person is the right to body autonomy.
Without the latter, you do not have the former.
Sadly, the only amendment to the constitution that reactionaries recognize to mean anything is the second. (And even with that one, they drop half the words to come to the conclusion they want.)
What’s “reactionary” about believing that stuff that’s in the constitution is the law and stuff that isn’t isn’t? The “right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” is not only in the Constitutional text, but gets its own whole-ass amendment. (And nobody is dropping any words. It says “militia” not “military.” The militia was a bring-your-own-gun concept at the time the second amendment was written.)
Control of your own body is the very first, most fundamental form of freedom. If you don't have it, the rest is window dressing and checkers on a taxi.
The 2a reactionaries drop the 'well-regulated' part when they read it.
The 4th amendment doesn’t provide some abstract “right to the security of your person.” It provides a very specific right: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
It’s a right to be free of unreasonable and warrantless searches. Nobody seriously believes that this preclude the government from regulating medical procedures such as abortion. You would be outraged if someone tried to read a contract in a similarly hand-wavey fashion in a way that was contrary to your interest.
You’re resorting to divine law again. Who says the right to bodily autonomy is the most “fundamental freedom?” And even if it is, where does the Constitution say it protects anything someone calls a “fundamental freedom?” And even if there is a right to bodily autonomy, how do you figure it bars the government from making it illegal to kill a human life you created?
“Well regulated” means you can require gun licenses and things like that. How do you figure it can be used to ban guns altogether?
Let's extend that line of argument: Who says the term "fundamental freedom" doesn't include the right not to be enslaved based on your skin color? No, it wasn't the Thirteenth Amendment, which merely codified that right: It was four years of one of the most-destructive wars the world had then ever seen, leaving hundreds of thousands of Americans dead or maimed, and the South impoverished for the better part of a century.
Conversely, the South (purportedly) seceded from the Union because a few thousand of its oligarchs and their acolytes felt that they had a "fundamental right," a divine right even, to continue to enslave millions of kidnapped Africans and their descendants. That didn't work out so well for them (nor, sadly, for the liberated blacks).
Ultimately, when claims of "fundamental rights" mean enough to enough people, those claims will be vindicated — or not — by force of arms.
TL;DR: FAFO — one way or another.
Ultimately, yeah.
EDIT (it's too late to revise the post above): Obviously, it should be, "Who says the term 'fundamental freedom' includes [not, 'doesn't include'] the right not to be enslaved based on your skin color?"
But apparently they still made extra laws for homicides and manslaughter (in the states), and taking drugs is also regulated with explicit laws, even though what you put in your body is a big part of controlling your body, ain't it?
(Conversely, in Common Law precedent crumbles before a judge sufficiently motivated to find reasons why the case before her differs enough to warrant a new judgement. Often there are even multiple precedents to choose from, depending on which features of the case you want to emphasise.
Identifying a precedent is like find a metaphor or analogy.)
That any lower courts need to follow the Supreme Court decision, basically.
Full explanation in PT-BR here: https://www.mpf.mp.br/atuacao-tematica/repercussao-geral
To me it seems like the concept of “human rights” is like the idea that there is “divine law” that overrides man-made law, which judges discover by looking into seeing stones. It doesn’t make sense, and is really just a way of imposing a particular quasi-religious worldview onto the democratic majority.
That's a fun-house mirror perspective: Nowadays, what you think of as "the democratic majority" seems to want to impose its own explicitly-religious worldview(s) onto unwilling others.
The fundamental unit of democracy is the polity, not the individual. Democracy is neutral as to religion—i.e. religious motivations are no different than all the other motivations the majority may have for any particular law.
The implication being, each of us must govern our life by whatever "the polity" decides — sounds pretty authoritarian.
> mullahs of secular humanism
Sounds like a victimhood complex: "We religious people are being persecuted, because we have voting control of the government in [some polity] but we're not being allowed to use that control to force everyone else in that polity to live by our (untestable) metaphysical beliefs — it's not fair!"
But more importantly: There are no "mullahs of secular humanism" who insist on telling everyone else how they must live. I'd wager that no secular humanist has ever told a man that he must marry another man, or (modulo the CCP's former one-child policy) a woman that she must abort her pregnancy.
On the contrary, it's the (soi-disant) "Christian" versions of mullahs who insist variously that no one can marry anyone of the same sex — or use IVF or birth control — or get divorced for no fault — etc. — on the ground that each of those things is (supposedly) against God's law as they perceive it.
They're the ones who insist on forcing a pregnant woman to carry her embryo or fetus to term on the ground that supposedly it's just as "human" in God's eyes as a born baby — according to their religion.
So let's not talk about mullahs of secular humanism — the mullahs are on the other side of that debate.
By polity, do you mean a Greek city state of at most a few thousand people? Or do you mean something the size of the Roman Republic (but not the provinces)? Or do you mean something the size of modern federal republic of India? Or do you mean individual Swiss Cantons? Or perhaps the European Union? Or individual political parties, as long as they elect their internal leadership democratically?
I'm not sure if there is a 'fundamental unit', but if you want to make an argument that the 'polity' is the fundamental unit, you at least need to say which level. So eg municipality, county, state, nation, supra-national institutions like EU or even the UN? And that's just for federal countries. There are also unitarian countries and probably lots of weird edge cases.
The US Supreme Court just decided that bribing an official is legal as long as the payment for the action happens after the favor has been granted. If you give a judge $10k to influence his opinion court that is illegal. If you give the judge a wink and pay him the $10k after he delivers his opinion, that’s just gratuity and is perfectly fine. Work hard enough and long enough and you can get enough justices vetted by a very specific organization and all sort of things are possible.
https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-public-corruption-b...
> The high court’s 6-3 opinion along ideological lines found the law criminalizes bribes given before an official act, not rewards handed out after.
> “Some gratuities can be problematic. Others are commonplace and might be innocuous,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote. The lines aren’t always clear, especially since many state and local officials have other jobs, he said.
> The high court sided with James Snyder, a Republican who was convicted of taking $13,000 from a trucking company after prosecutors said he steered about $1 million worth of city contracts to the company.
https://oglobo.globo.com/politica/noticia/2023/10/16/pacheco...
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "the way that phrase would be understood by an american audience". In Brazil, there's some correlation between social strata and skin color. This is a consequence of slavery and the way the country dealt with its end, pushing former slaves to marginalization. And I believe the US went through similar developments, no?
Anyway, the fact is that, currently, due to the lack of objectivity of the current law and to the racism ingrained on society, statistically, judges do adopt more "relaxed" standards when judging white and rich people, and there are studies showing that
Yes, and skin colour isn't binary. It's not even a linear spectrum. If you want to make it into a spectrum, or even something with only a small finite number of categories, that's more of an act of culture than of colour perception.
'Black people' in the US has specific meanings embedded in American culture.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Brazilians for some background in Brazil.
I watched the judge’s talk here in Portuguese https://youtu.be/qQYoE0xBkCo?si=wWfJf7Wjs4NKpO_5
Alexandre de Moraes referred to data that he had which showed that a young illiterate black guy will be considered a dealer with 20g of cannabis, while a middle aged graduated white man will need 60g for the same to happen. He also talks about what happens after someone gets caught with cannabis, they have to go watch a lecture, but since there’s no punishment for not attending it, nobody shows up.
His intention is to remind everyone that the current state of the law is ineffective and ends up affecting only the underprivileged (while not discounting punishment for those who really are trying to sell drugs and benefit from it, mentioning that a person getting caught in the act of selling should be really punished).
The white kids, wealthy tourists, bank employees, etc. who smoke some dope at the end of the day never, ever, think twice about it.
I'm specifically interested in the (cultural?) translation into American English of what was said originally.
I have no beef with the judges statement itself.
Yes, I know. However, I was talking more about the cultural context than the language alone.
Just like the UK and the US (and India and Singapore and Hong Kong and Australia etc) all have different cultural context, and sometimes the same words can have different meanings.
It was an interesting learning experience.
I wonder if/how much the Brazilians are influenced by the Americans here.
(Going on a tangent: I remember during a very brief stint working at Facebook, when they were blathering on about 'Black history month' or something like that. I have nothing against 'Black history month' in the US. But this was in the Singaporean office, and we have more relevant issues in South East Asia, including issues of local racism, too. I can see why Facebook (or Meta..) would care as an American company, but it was really weird seeing corporate project that into South East Asia.)
Because there is no common definition for blackness.
We code a lot into “black” in American English. Those frameworks don’t map to other cultures. A Black American, black Brazilian, Lagos native, Tigrayan, Darfurian and South Indian may have identical skin tones; that doesn’t make their cultures comparable or imply they’d each identify as black.
But the rest of the world doesn't share American culture.
I'm British as far back as the family tree goes, and I've been surprised at least once by a person revealing they faced racial prejudice for "being black", and my surprise was because their skin colour was so close to my own, mine being approximately that of Colin Powell in this particular photo (given my current display brightness settings etc.): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Colin_Po...
Because of politics.
There's no reason why it can't, except not everywhere is America, and words can have different meanings. What's your concern about someone investigating the non-US centric meaning of the word, to see if there's a difference?
Mexico didn't just decriminalize it either, the country's supreme court outright, definitively legalized recreational consumption and possession of marijuana in 2021, but because of a blend of dishonest law enforcement, state-level legal inertia and lack of clearly defined regulatory follow-through, and extremely ambiguous enforcement procedures, people, to this day, regularly get arrested and charged with possession, even of very small amounts.
My main point: a media-friendly formal announcement of a certain new legal freedom in many countries (particularly developing countries with shitty, half-functional institutions) often widely fails to show meaningful improvements on the ground for years afterward.