The latest edition of Revista Platô brings together political thoughts, research and several calls to action to strengthen the link between global drug policy reform and environmental justice.
Published by the Brazilian Platform for Drug Policy (PBPD), Platô has annually covered pressing drug policy issues connected to the Brazilian experience of drug use and control. First launched in 2017, it has explored cannabis legalisation, stimulant substitution, racism in drugs policing, and more.
The latest edition entitled “Intersections” was a joint effort between PBPD, Iniciativa Negra and the Drug Policy Reform and Environmental Justice International Coalition. It is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
Drugs and the environment
The magazine’s published is timed to lay the conceptual groundwork of Brazilian and international advocates ahead of the upcoming Conference of Parties (COP) 30th meeting, which will be held from 10 to 21 November in Brazil. Known as COP30, this United Nations gathering will be happening in the Amazon-neighbouring state of Belém, with a thematic focus on indigenous communities and socio-environmental violations.
Intersections highlights how growing violence and insecurity in the Amazon due to environmental and drug-related crimes means a new approach to both areas is needed. In 17 stories, the magazine covers a massive expanse of topics, ranging from environmental crimes that are funded by drug trafficking, to religious fundamentalism in drug treatment for indigenous youth, to exploring alternative drug control models that are based in environmental sustainability and harm reduction.
Speaking with Renato Filev, the editor of this latest edition, he highlighted that Intersections was the result of years of activism and key meetings between environmental and drug policy activists that began in mid-2024; as he explained, these meetings “allowed us to see the agenda in its breadth and the convergence of the struggles”. Championed by writer and activist Rebeca Lerer (the other editor of this edition), they worked together to make the links between climate and drug struggles incredibly clear.
“The attempt was to provoke reflection from anyone sensitive to the environmental agenda or drug policy on the shared similarities, the intersection of these and the ability to understand this complexity as a potential vector for change in these critical conditions, which affect the sovereignty of traditional peoples, democracies and future prospects for all,” Filev said.
Organised crime and their expanded activities
The connections between these themes were deeply explored in various contexts. A prominent theme that emerged was the growing breadth and depth of environmentally destructive activities that organised crime have engaged in, and how they are massively funded by the profits from the illegal drug trade.
In one piece, Daniela Dias de Souza highlights how organised criminal groups have expanded their “portfolio” across the Amazon, branching out from drug and arms trades to illegal mining and logging. Author Adriana Ramos showed how terms like “narcogarimpo” – connecting drug trafficking and illegal gold digging – have appeared in the Brazilian context to demonstrate the interlinked nature of these criminal activities. Ramos also underscored that public security experts attribute rises in lethal violence within Amazonian regions to disputes over national and transnational drug routes and the advance of deforestation, which exacerbates land conflicts and other illegal activities.
These new and expanded criminal portfolios not only increase the environmental degradation of fragile ecosystems, they further strain local governance while simultaneously strengthening criminal groups’ power. This context means that the Amazon requires policies that equally promote public and environmental security to ensure the safety of people and the environment.
State-led drug interventions and environmentally damaging industries
The magazine also explores how existing policies and government decisions exacerbate damages already brought upon the environment and communities of those existing around drug trades. Writers from the Marajó Observatory (located at the Amazon river’s estuary) underscore how police operations in the area, seeking to stop drug trafficking flowing out of the Amazon, actually target small-scale sellers and those using drugs. Wider trafficking networks are not impacted, while average citizens – particularly young men – are arrested, disrupting and permanently altering local communities’ lives.
The environmental damage created by state-led efforts to control drug markets, particularly drug cultivation, has long been documented: the aerial fumigation of coca crops with carcinogenic pesticides has happened for years, damaging surrounding crops and poisoning water sources. Forestland that has been cleared of coca plantations leave open spaces of land that are quietly taken over by cattle grazers, with few legal mechanisms in place for the public to contest ownership.
Violence has exploded in areas where drug traffickers and militarised police forces clash. As Pablo Nunes puts it in Intersections, a “dynamic of violence” is spiralling out of control, with rising homicides and territorial disputes leading to greater presence of firearms. The state has increased its technological repression, bringing in drones and facial recognition to key areas, encroaching on civil liberties under the guise of controlling crime. More examples exist, from the destruction of the environment of endangered animals by drug traffickers and loggers, to the aggressive expansion of legal cattle grazing into public forested lands.
Progress through reparations, ecology, and harm reduction
As Filev explained to TalkingDrugs:
“The current environmental agenda and drug policy work towards destruction, eradication and non-preservation, disrespect for ancestral knowledge, denying the ancient wisdom of peoples, plants and the complex interaction of these beings, a phenomenon that always occurs in an equally complex environment, whether in the city, in the countryside or in the forest.”
Moving towards socio-environmental justice will require unprecedented recognition of value and coordination of actions between environmental and drug policy activists, as well as a wider understanding of how these issues are connected.
To build these interlinked struggles, Filev – as well as other writers in Intersections – rely on the concept of necropolitics, which refers to how certain policies can control who or what gets to live or die. Within drugs and the environment, the practice of necropolitics is the state criminalising drug checking, preventing people from surviving drug use in the midst of a toxic drug supply; it is the police brutally cracking down on those using drugs in poor contexts (such as poor young Black men living in Brazilian favelas); it is exhausting natural resources to such an extent that the land and all that lived on it dies.
Good management of land, forest, and powerful plants is needed for the future, with responsible drug regulation to control illegal drug markets and the funds they generate for illegal activities. This is particularly pressing at this crucial time as criminal groups diversify their portfolios, but are still dependent on drug trafficking profits to sustain operations.
Civil society organisations representing all communities and environments impacted by environmental destruction and drug prohibition must work together to build a new vision for the future that, as Filev said, “strengthens the collective without losing the power of diversity and individuality”.
The magazine is a great exploration of Brazil’s lived experience of drug and climate damage, while also making the case for how progress for both can happen through proper policymaking.
Intersections can be read here.
