Questões de Vestibular

            Brazil must legalise drugs – its existing policy just destroys lives

      For decades, guns and imprisonment have been the hallmarks of Brazil’s war against the drug trafficking. But the only way to beat the gangs is to stop creating criminals, says a top Brazilian judge

      “The war raging in Rocinha, Latin America’s largest favela, has already been lost. Rooted in a dispute between gangs for control of drug trafficking, it has disrupted the daily life of the community in Rio de Janeiro since mid-September. With the sound of shots coming from all sides, schools and shops are constantly forced to close. Recently, a stray bullet killed a Spanish tourist. The war is not the only thing being lost.

      For decades, Brazil has had the same drug policy approach. Police, weapons and numerous arrests. It does not take an expert to conclude the obvious: the strategy has failed. Drug trafficking and consumption have only increased. […]

      In a case still before the Brazilian supreme court, I voted for decriminalising the possession of marijuana for private consumption. […] 

      Drugs are an issue that has a profound impact on the criminal justice system, and it is legitimate for the supreme court to participate in the public debate. So here are the reasons for my views.

      First, drugs are bad and it is therefore the role of the state and society to discourage consumption, treat dependents and repress trafficking. The rationale behind legalisation is rooted in the belief that it will help in achieving these goals.

      Second, the war on drugs has failed. Since the 1970s, under the influence and leadership of the US, the world has tackled this problem with the use of police forces, armies, and armaments. The tragic reality is that 40 years, billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of prisoners and thousands of deaths later, things are worse. At least in countries like Brazil.

      Third, as the American economist Milton Friedman argued, the only result of criminalisation is ensuring the trafficker’s monopoly. 

      With these points in mind, what would legalisation achieve?

      In most countries in North America and Europe, the greatest concern of the authorities is users and the impact drugs have on their lives and on society. These are all important considerations. In Brazil, however, the principal focus must be ending the dominance drug dealers exercise over poor communities. Gangs have become the main political and economic power in thousands of modest neighbourhoods in Brazil. This scenario prevents a family of honest and hard-working people from educating their children away from the influence of criminal factions, who intimidate, co-opt and exercise an unfair advantage over any lawful activity. Crucially, this power of trafficking comes from illegality.

       Another benefit of legalisation would be to prevent the mass incarceration of impoverished young people with no criminal record who are arrested for trafficking because they are caught in possession of negligible amounts of marijuana. A third of detainees in Brazil are imprisoned for drug trafficking. Once arrested, young prisoners will have to join one of the factions that control the penitentiaries – and on that day, they become dangerous.

      […]

      We cannot be certain that a progressive and cautious policy of decriminalisation and legalisation will be successful. What we can affirm is that the existing policy of criminalisation has failed. We must take chances; otherwise, we risk simply accepting a terrible situation. As the Brazilian navigator Amyr Klink said: “The worst shipwreck is not setting off at all.” 

Disponível em: <https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/nov/15/brazil-must-legalise-drugs-existing-policy-destroys-lives-luis-roberto-barroso-supreme-court-judge> . Acesso em: 14 nov. 2017.

      In today’s political climate, it sometimes feels like we can’t even agree on basic facts. We bombard each other with statistics and figures, hoping that more data will make a difference. A progressive person might show you the same climate change graphs over and over while a conservative person might point to the trillions of dollars of growing national debt. We’re left wondering, “Why can’t they just see? It’s so obvious!”

      Certain myths are so pervasive that no matter how many experts disprove them, they only seem to grow in popularity. There’s no shortage of serious studies showing no link between autism and vaccines, for example, but these are no match for an emotional appeal to parents worried for their young children.

      Tali Sharot, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, studies how our minds work and how we process new information. In her upcoming book, The Influential Mind, she explores why we ignore facts and how we can get people to actually listen to the truth. Tali shows that we’re open to new information – but only if it confirms our existing beliefs. We find ways to ignore facts that challenge our ideals. And as neuroscientist Bahador Bahrami and colleagues have found, we weigh all opinions as equally valid, regardless of expertise.

      So, having the data on your side is not always enough. For better or for worse, Sharot says, emotions may be the key to changing minds.

                                          (Shankar Vedantam. www.npr.org. Adaptado.)

                            “One never builds something finished”:

                   the brilliance of architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha

Oliver Wainwright

February 4, 2017

   “All space is public,” says Paulo Mendes da Rocha. “The only private space that you can imagine is in the human mind.” It is an optimistic statement from the 88-year-old Brazilian architect, given he is a resident of São Paulo, a city where the triumph of the private realm over the public could not be more stark. The sprawling megalopolis is a place of such marked inequality that its superrich hop between their rooftop helipads because they are too scared of street crime to come down from the clouds.

   But for Mendes da Rocha, who received the 2017 gold medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects this week – an accolade previously bestowed on such luminaries as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright – the ground is everything. He has spent his 60-year career lifting his massive concrete buildings up, in gravity-defying balancing acts, or else burying them below ground in an attempt to liberate the Earth’s surface as a continuous democratic public realm. “The city has to be for everybody,” he says, “not just for the very few.”

                                                                                    (www.theguardian.com. Adaptado.)