Resumo:
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.