Modernidade e cocaína Belle époqué cariocale: o discurso médico na construção de degenerados e delinquentes

Abstract

The process of Brazilian modernization was also the moment of affirmation of medicine as an authority. The physicians, holders of the knowledge, influenced the structural changes of the society and also of the state apparatus. Through medical authority, cocaine was introduced as a new drug in Brazilian society and later condemned by law. As a new global product, cocaine moved markets and the scientific world, but ended up being banned globally along with other substances building what we now know as "the drug problem". Although also physicians, psychiatrists stand in oppossition to any use of cocaine. His speeches, a few decades after the inicital epiphany, are condemning. Psychiatry itself as a specific branch of medicine facing a new problem, drug addiction. As a scenario, the urban transformations that Rio de Janeiro crossed also offered profound changes in the social fabric of Rio de Janeiro , which contributed both to popularization of consumption by society and to symmary condemnation by the State.