Com mais técnica, com mais ciência : controvérsias em torno dos procedimentos regulatórios e científicos com cannabis no Brasil

Abstract

Cannabis has a difficult definition, since its uses and purposes are immersed in a set of controversies. This dissertation seeks, inspired by the social studies of science, to follow the public controversies that involve the regulatory and scientific procedures that concerns Cannabis and are in constant relationship with different actors and their processes. We took 2014 as a milestone, because in that year, the use of cannabidiol (one of the active ingredients of Cannabis) for the treatment of children with epilepsies refractory to conventional medicines, brought new questions to the social, economic and political debate about the use of this substance in Brazil. The networks formed around the search for regulation and legalization for therapeutic purposes in Brazil are marked by the activism of family members and patients who developed techniques for their use. This practices configure an inversion in the traditional logic between lay and scientific knowledge, with their participation in the development of science and technology. The different uses of Cannabis are involved in controversies regarding the applicability of its derivatives in a therapeutic way. Considering the ambiguous place occupied by Cannabis today, as a “drug” and “medicine”, this dissertation continues to pursue multiple networks and actors. They are the National Health Surveillance Agency, Federal Council of Medicine, researchers, associations, pharmaceutical companies, research groups, patients and activists. The analysis presented here are based on fieldwork that privileged official documents, scientific articles, newspaper articles and other media available on the internet, tracing the participation of these different actors in the technological and scientific development with Cannabis in the country, between the years 2014 and 2019. In this path, we pay attention to the importance of each of these actors in maintaining their own controversies in motion, instability and constant mutation. Thus, we understand here Cannabis as a participant that engenders relationships and networks, constituting different types of scientific and technical facts.