The Brazilian Anarchy and the Moral Collapse of the War on Drugs
What we have seen in Rio de Janeiro is what one sees in any territory where anarchy takes root: the factual absence of a State capable of monopolizing the use of coercion to prevent and combat violence. I understand violence as the improper use of coercion — in this case, of force itself.
Coercion can be used in two fundamentally different ways: either as a means of aggression — the violation of individual rights — or as a retaliatory means, to restrain those who initiated force. When criminals threaten or attack the physical integrity, liberty, or property of their victims, they are exercising coercion immorally. The only morally legitimate response to such acts is retaliatory coercion — the use of force by the State, through the police, to restore justice and security where they have been violated.
This confrontation between violent coercion and retaliatory coercion — between the aggressor and the agent of justice — becomes catastrophic when it ceases to resemble law enforcement and begins to resemble civil war. And indeed, that is what it is: a domestic war. Populations living under the rule of criminal factions, in territories controlled like autonomous states, are not spectators but victims of this conflict.
In those regions, the State no longer holds the monopoly of force — and wherever the State withdraws, barbarism prevails.
We often use the term anarchy to describe “no man’s land.” No laws, no order, no legitimate sovereignty. Yet anarchy also exists when, within the same territory, there is an ethical and political struggle for control over coercion — when armed groups and the State itself fight to determine which moral code and which laws will rule that society.
Brazil, especially in its major urban centers, has become the stage of this struggle. The civil war that corrodes our cities is not accidental; it is the logical consequence of moral and political premises long planted in our institutions.
The Historical Causality of a Tragedy
The roots of this tragedy lie in the moralistic and paternalistic crusade known as the War on Drugs. Under the pretense of protecting society, the State criminalized the voluntary consumption of substances that alter one’s state of consciousness. What should have been a matter of medicine and individual choice was turned into a matter for the police. That decision inaugurated an endless war — not against drugs, but against liberty.
Brazil’s prohibitionist model mirrored the American one officially declared by Richard Nixon in 1971. In Brazil, the escalation began during the 1980s and 1990s and was institutionalized with Law No. 11.343/2006, which hardened penalties for trafficking and expanded police authority while blurring the line between user and dealer.
The results were explosive: between 2005 and 2015, the number of people imprisoned for drug-related crimes grew by 339%, according to the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA). Today, roughly 30% of Brazil’s entire prison population is incarcerated for drug offenses — mostly young, Black, and poor.
This declared war produced the exact opposite of what it promised: it neither reduced consumption nor destroyed trafficking; it created a billion-dollar black market governed by violence, corruption, and lawlessness.
By 2019, Brazil had become one of the main export routes for cocaine to Europe and Africa, according to a Brookings Institution report. Over 90% of the cocaine seized in Brazil originated from Bolivia and Peru, with the country acting as a strategic corridor for global trafficking. In other words, the nation that declared war on drugs became one of its principal logistical hubs.
The Creation of Crime and the Expansion of Coercion
The war on drugs does not fight crime — it creates crime.
By criminalizing voluntary behavior that harms no one, the State artificially produced a new category of offense: the victimless crime. No one is violated when an adult chooses to consume a substance that affects only his or her own body and consciousness. Yet by outlawing that choice, the State converted millions of peaceful citizens into offenders — and in doing so, handed the entire market over to the most violent among us.
Prohibition does not eliminate trade; it transfers it to the underworld, where disputes are not settled by reason, contract, or law, but by brute force. The moral inversion is complete: what was once a personal choice becomes the cause of murder, extortion, and war.
Each bullet fired, each body found in a ditch, is a by-product of political hubris — of the attempt to ban what cannot morally be banned: individual will.
By forbidding production, commerce, and consumption through coercive law, the government created a market reserve for psychopaths — a market where only those willing to kill, die, or corrupt could participate. Once consolidated, this monopoly of violence did not remain confined to drugs. Using the same methods of intimidation and coercion, the criminal factions expanded their power to other essential services — internet, gas, water, transport — by violently eliminating former suppliers and intimidating potential competitors.
What began as a war on drugs evolved into a war on commerce itself: an economy of coercion, where every transaction is mediated by threat, and every profit is guaranteed by fear.
The “drug territories” thus became full-fledged fiefdoms of coercive capitalism — not the free market of voluntary exchange, but a black market of forced transactions, sustained by the barrel of a gun.
Between 2017 and 2022, according to the Fogo Cruzado Institute, the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area recorded over 36,000 gunfights — roughly one per hour. Another study by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) found that between 2008 and 2019, 45% of days in the city had at least one shootout reported.
These are not mere numbers. They are the statistical face of institutional collapse.
Misplaced Priorities and Systemic Corruption
By dedicating enormous resources to repressing the consumption and trade of narcotics, the State diverts police and judicial attention away from crimes with real victims — murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping — to persecute users and small dealers who pose no direct threat to society. Each “anti-drug” operation consumes lives, time, and money that should be spent protecting the innocent and punishing aggressors. The moral compass of law enforcement has been reversed: the peaceful are treated as criminals, while the true aggressors thrive.
Yet the most corrosive effect of this war is less visible: systemic corruption.
Prohibition creates a highly profitable illegal market — and wherever profits exist without legitimacy, corruption follows. Organized crime cannot survive without the cooperation of the State. Politicians, police officers, judges, and bureaucrats are co-opted to ensure the continuity of a criminal economy that the law itself sustains.
A vicious circle emerges: one side writes the laws that make prohibition lucrative; the other pays to guarantee impunity.
In 2023, Brazil had more than 80 organized criminal groups, according to a report by the British Home Office (Country Policy and Information Note – Organized Criminal Groups, 2025). The two largest — Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and Comando Vermelho (CV) — move billions of reais each year and have proven connections inside police departments, city halls, courts, and legislatures.
The war on drugs, therefore, does not suppress crime — it institutionalizes crime within the State itself.
The Collapse of Moral Coercion and the Path to Freedom
The war on drugs is the most striking example of the improper use of coercion.
It violates the moral axiom of a free society: that force may only be used in retaliation against those who initiate it.
When the State becomes the initiator of coercion — when it punishes individuals who have harmed no one — it stands on the same moral ground as the aggressor it condemns. The result is the collapse of legitimacy, the erosion of trust, and the rise of a parallel moral order built on fear.
State coercion cannot replace reason.
What cannot be solved through liberty cannot be solved through force.
The answer to a non-coercive problem — voluntary consumption — is individual freedom and moral responsibility, not prohibition or violence.
Legalization, regulation, and education are tools of civilization; prohibition, repression, and war are tools of barbarism.
As long as the State insists on waging wars against individual rights, it will continue to lose the wars that truly matter: the wars for morality, justice, and reason.
Conclusion
Brazil lives through a low-intensity civil war — the direct product of a policy that criminalizes free will and rewards brute force.
By declaring war on drugs, the State declared war on freedom.
And in losing that war, it also lost the moral right to govern.
What remains is to rebuild the civilizing principle that once defined humanity’s progress: that force exists to serve life, not to destroy it.
Peace is not the fruit of coercion; it is the fruit of liberty.
And liberty will only prevail when coercion is restored to its rightful role — to protect, not to violate, the individual’s sacred right to live for his own sake, free from the aggressor and free from the State.