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Brazil

Brazil is the fifth-largest country in the world in both size and population. Since 2000, illegal drugs and drug trafficking have been increasingly problematic for the country. Marijuana, used by approximately 3 percent of the adult population, is the most commonly used illegal drug in Brazil. Cocaine and amphetamine-type stimulants are used by an estimated 0.7 percent of the population annually. Bazuco, a cocaine-production side-product, is widely abused in the poor urban areas of Brazil. Drug trafficking in those areas supports a network of criminal enterprises, and law enforcement efforts have been characterized by human-rights abuses. Recently, however, reports of crime and police abuse have decreased.

Brazil became a hub for South American cocaine trafficking in the 1980s, especially after the governments of Colombia and Peru began their ardent campaigns against drug trafficking in those countries. Bolivia, then and now one of the world's leading growers of the coca leaf, shares a poorly guarded border with Brazil. Brazil was then the only South American country with a manufacturing industry that produced ethers and acetone—common chemical products in the developed industrial world, with many legitimate purposes, but also necessary for the processing of coca leaf into cocaine. Raw coca leaf paste or refined coca base were trafficked across the border from Bolivia to Brazil, for processing and shipment.

Once the drug cartels had established a strong presence in Brazil, the busy international airport in Rio de Janeiro (which offered many more daily flights to Europe than in the smaller South American countries) was used not only to ship the cocaine processed in Brazil, but processed cocaine from elsewhere as well. Attempts by the Brazilian government to make ether and acetone harder to acquire for the cartels had no long-term effect, but the influx of Brazilian-processed cocaine into Western European countries did result in more international help being offered to Brazil's Federal Narcotics Council.

Decriminalization

By the dawn of the 21st century, Brazil suffered from serious and expensive prison overpopulation, experiencing an increase in per capita prisoner population of over 80 percent from 1995 to 2004. In that time, penalties for drug trafficking had increased, but the definition of drug trafficking was a loose one. As many as an eighth of Brazilian prisoners as of 2004 had been convicted of drug trafficking even though there was no evidence that they had intent to distribute the drugs in their possession, which were in small enough quantity that they could have been for personal use. Unlike in, for instance, the United States, Brazilian drug law made little distinction between the sale and use of drugs: arrest a neighborhood drug dealer and his infrequent customer on the same street corner, and they both faced the same prison sentence of 3–15 years, in a system less inclined toward early parole than in the United States.

A new law passed in 2004 attempted to address this problem by significantly reducing the criminal nature of drug possession. Instead of arresting someone guilty only of possession of small quantities (with no evidence of intent to distribute), they would be issued a citation and a punishment left up to the judge, intended to be a form of community service.

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