Do capitalismo como religião à colonialidade do ser: uma avaliação em profundidade das políticas públicas sobre drogas na dimensão da saúde mental

Abstract

The contemporary Brazilian state is experiencing processes of democratic regression and far-right populism driven by the political mobilization of religion as a means to legitimize and expand authoritarianism, creating a scenario of dismantling public policies. This scenario directly impacts public drug policies in the field of mental health by weakening and dismantling the ethics of care associated with the Psychosocial Care paradigm, favoring the unethical paradigm of prohibitionism/asylum-based approaches, whose ultimate expressions are the war on drugs and the actions of Therapeutic Communities. In this context, our research examines the intersections of religion, politics, and economics in the implementation of Brazilian public drug policies within the scope of mental health. The general objective is to evaluate these policies based on the experiences of managers, professionals, and users who implement them locally within the Psychosocial Care Network (RAPS, in Portuguese) in Fortaleza, Ceará. The evaluative perspective used to analyze the subject is a systematization combining in-depth evaluation (Rodrigues, 2008) and the experiential method (Lejano, 2012). As a result, starting from the premise that capitalism operates as a sacrificial religion, we demonstrate that neoliberal economic religion is a structural element of the contemporary Brazilian state, underpinning the idolatry of the market and the production of expendable subjects. Additionally, together with institutional agents and policy recipients within the RAPS of Fortaleza, we observed that the biopolitical amalgam formed by the conjunction of neoliberal ideology, conservative discourse, prohibitionist logic, fundamentalist religiosity, and the asylum-based paradigm reproduces colonial care practices in the field of mental health. We argue that these issues constitute what we call the coloniality of being a drug user, a condition of existential inferiority that marks the bodies and experiences of these individuals in the Brazilian reality.