The current debate on drugs has Therapeutic Communities (TCs) Institutions as an inescapable agenda. Committed to the "treatment" of people who make regular use of these substances, the expansion of the TC model expresses, in recent history, the recurrence of an intriguing sociocultural phenomenon, endowed with an undeniable political force. This study aims to understand the nuances of the process of expansion and popularization of TCs in Brazil, based on a critical analysis of the structure, functioning and organization of these institutions, as well as the elements that enable their occurrence. This is about an ethnography that also seeks to identify the social and subjective profile of drug users who adhere to treatment in these establishments, the regularity of motivations for this adherence, as well as the possible meanings given to the institutional experience and its outcomes. Guided by the phenomenological and conceptual perspective of experience and the paradigm of corporeality, data collection favored the understanding of a group of individuals who experienced treatment in one of the establishments that is part of the largest network of therapeutic communities in Brazil. Data analysis was based on ethnographic categories, having as main references Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics and Erving Goffman's institutional analysis model. Based on this study, it is understood that drugs are inventions or biopolitical devices that engender, in different times and cultures, forms of body regulation. From this perspective, therapeutic communities operate as institutional mechanisms aimed at controlling and disciplining individual users, justified by the discourse of “therapeutic” practices and recovery. The expansion of this model expresses, in the current historical, political, and social context, the ideal of “war on drugs”, marked by prohibitionism and reiterated by asylum culture, the rise of authoritarian movements, neoliberalism and, above all, by religious fundamentalism.