Visões e representações de adolescentes sobre drogas

Abstract

Over the last years, debates about drugs have been intensified, mainly in terms of narcoticconsumption and trafficking among teenagers. These debates go beyond the event themselves, so they are commonly associated with violence or crime protest. In Brazil, personal experiences involving psychoactive substances,especially those related to illicit drugs, are treated as a public health and/or justiceissue. The dominant speechis based on repressive and prohibitionist logic. Considering this reality, this dissertation was based on a research, which set its objective on the investigation of adolescents' perspectives and representations about drugs in order to explore: information; experience; possible relation with violence; drug politics and actions. The survey was carried out with students whose age varied from 13 to 15 years old, enrolled in eighth and ninth grades of a publicelementary school in Cataguases, Zona da Mata region, in Minas Gerais. The qualitative method provides the comprehension of representations, theintelligibility of social phenomena and the meanings ascribed to agent of drug occurrence. The technique used to collect information in field was the Focus Group. Through a conversation, which had its goal previously defined, we worked on investigated audience's perceptions and it came up with the following results: the consumption and trafficking of drugs is part of the adolescents‟ daily routines. Therefore,direct and indirect experiences are common among them. Pieces of information about psychoactive substances are permeated by a prohibitionist speech; there is the understanding that drugs are related to violence, especially when it involves drug trafficking; students are barely aware of politics and actions developed to drug prevention. By the interviewees' reports, the practical speech of teenagers was compared to the scientific one. At the end, a couple of questions, should be analyzed to drug comprehension and its possible relations, were debated considering the complexity of the event. Based on interactive perspective,Brochu (2006) and Da Agra (2008)suggest another way to "deal with the problem" of the consumption and trafficking of drugs.