“É prohibida a venda e uso do pito do pango”: o proibicionismo da cannabis no Rio de Janeiro do século XIX

Abstract

The work travels through different spaces connected by the Atlantic where a culture of Cannabis was developed to understand the reasons that led to its prohibition by the City Council of Rio de Janeiro in 1830, the starting point of a growing social condemnation of the plant and its uses in Brazil. A city undergoing rapid urban and demographic expansion, Rio de Janeiro had a large black population, the majority of which were Bantu Africans from the central-western and eastern regions. Many peoples of these two regions of the African continent, as well as Europeans, have been related for centuries, and in multiple ways, with the plants Cannabis indica and Cannabis sativa. There was a daily consumption of Cannabis as a psychoactive drug among the enslaved of the largest African nations of the Court, known as pito do pango or just pango. The central thesis of this research is that the municipal prohibition of 1830 targeted this use, specifically, due to the fear of its psychoactive effects on Africans, in a context of increased control over black populations in the city. Furthermore, it is shown that this process was deeply connected to the prohibitionist ideology that was being built through the contact between Europeans and African and Asian cannabis cultures from the 16th century onwards.