2024 was yet another successful year for the Marcha da Maconha. The Brazilian cannabis march in São Paulo this year brought together over 70,000 people protesting peacefully through the city’s largest avenues. From consumers to cultivators, from patients to activists, the Marchas have become an annual event and a unique moment to display the full array of the diverse Brazilian cannabis liberation movement.
Fighting for community recognition
The history of the Marcha da Maconha is a reminder of the power of popular action against unfair laws, and how organising a movement can help carve out a space for its presence.
Brazilian cannabis marches have happened sporadically since 2002, growing from a desire to publicly demonstrate support for new cannabis legislation and against brutal police enforcement of its prohibition. Initially, the marches took place on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro but later swelled in attendance, multiplying into several marches run simultaneously across Brazil. The first one organised at a national scale was set for 2008, with marches planned across ten state capitals.
The day before the marches were meant to occur, state police forces in nine of the ten locations imposed a ban, withdrawing their previously secured permissions to protest. The Public Assembly of Rio de Janeiro would justify the ban on these peaceful demonstrations by claiming that they were meant to disguise the criminal intent to smoke cannabis in public. Five people were even arrested for “inciting criminality” after distributing pamphlets.
The police would use the same tactic to disrupt marches over the following years: organisers would announce a date and get permission for their peaceful demonstrations, only to be banned the day before. This pattern continued until the São Paulo cannabis march of 2011. Like in previous years, the organisers received authorisation to march, which was then revoked at the last minute. With less than 24 hours to go, organisers made an agreement with the police that the cannabis march would instead become a march for freedom of speech: cannabis-related messages were taped out of posters and t-shirts; messages calling for the end of police brutality were prioritised.
While the police initially agreed, they changed their mind on the day of the march. The same police chief that had negotiated and accepted the change of the march’s purpose arrested Julio Delmanto, one of the organisers. Police kettled protesters, firing rubber bullets, pepper spray and tear gas to disperse them.
This brutal crackdown on a peaceful demonstration for free speech was brought forward by legal activists to the Brazilian Supreme Court. In a turning point for the history of Brazilian cannabis activism, the Supreme Court voted unanimously in June 2011 that the cannabis marches were constitutionally protected: they were an expression of the freedom to organise and speak freely, and calling for the end of the drug war was not inciting or condoning criminal activities.
The Court’s ruling, as with many other Brazilian drug policy successes, proved fateful to legally protect the march’s future.
A new era for cannabis
“That was a milestone in the public debate around cannabis in Brazil,” Rebeca Lerer, one of the organisers of the São Paulo Marchas da Maconha, told TalkingDrugs.
“It set the legal precedent that magazines, media influencers on the internet, brands, all of this communications ecosystem could now openly talk about cannabis without the risk of being criminalised.”
Enabling the growth of a more complex ecosystem and understanding of cannabis, the ruling also meant that activists could widen the causes constituting these marches. Already in 2011, march organisers said they were not just fighting for cannabis decriminalisation; they were against police brutality in the name of upholding unfair drug laws.
“The march for freedom wants to congregate more movements due to the actions against the [2011 march], it’s not just a bigger [cannabis march],” Paíque Duques, the organiser of the Brasília cannabis march, told Globo in 2011.
This practice of accommodating diverse yet interlinked causes has continued to this day, as Lerer described to TalkingDrugs.
“We are organised in blocks during the protests. That’s a way to allow people who work on different social justice issues to join the protest in their intersections. So we had indigenous groups, we had queer groups, we had medical use groups, psychedelic blocks, a woman’s block…”.
“We’re not on the street to smoke weed”
While the cannabis marches have always had a broad scope against drug-related and police-led violence, the need to broaden their mission is more important today than ever. Faced with the possible criminalisation of all drug use through a constitutional amendment, the march “is no longer fighting for progress, but defending it from deterioration,” as organiser Malu Brito put it at this year’s demonstration.
“We’re not on the street to smoke weed. The march is to end the drug war, end the genocide of young Black people, end the overcrowding of prisons, for bodily autonomy, for mental health, for harm reduction instead of forced treatment… It’s for cannabis, but not just for cannabis,” Luiz Fernando Petty, an organiser, told BdF.
Lerer confirmed this sentiment. “We show [through the marches] that this is a social issue, not a criminal justice or just a health issue, it’s about us as people as well. That is the role of social movements… to have this presence on the streets and sustain political change.”
In a country with almost 40,000 murders per year, where drug-related violence features heavily in national media, while brutal violence is enacted on poor, Black, indigenous and over-policed communities, Brazilian cannabis marches are an opportunity to take over the streets and protest against harsh laws. The fact that cannabis marches now happen across XXX cities every year in Brazil is a chance for those experiencing state-led criminalisation, police violence and harassment to come out and reclaim the streets.