Healing the Divide: Cannabis, Class, and Justice in Modern Brazil

On a quiet street in São Bernardo do Campo, behind the headquarters of Brazil's most iconic labor union, history is unfolding. In a modest space built on decades of collective struggle, workers and their families are lining up not to protest—but to heal. For the first time, a Brazilian labor union is offering legal, affordable cannabis treatment to its members.

This is more than a health initiative. It's a statement.

While official state policy still clings to outdated and punitive drug laws, the Metalworkers' Union of ABC is signaling something different: that wellness is a right, not a privilege, and that cannabis belongs not to luxury clinics or pharmaceutical shareholders, but to the people. Especially the ones who've broken their backs to build this country.

A Union-Led U-Turn in Drug Policy

The partnership between the union and the therapeutic association Flor da Vida brings cannabis-based treatment to an estimated 50,000 workers and their families—many of whom suffer from chronic pain, insomnia, anxiety, epilepsy, or neurodivergence. These are forklift drivers, line operators, cleaners, retirees—the backbone of Brazil's industrial economy.

"I've been dealing with chronic back pain for fifteen years," says Maria Santos, a 52-year-old assembly line worker and union member. "The pills from the pharmacy weren't helping anymore, and the side effects were terrible. Now, with the cannabis oil, I can sleep through the night again."

Until now, access to cannabis-based medicine in Brazil has been legally possible but structurally impossible for most. Products are either imported from abroad—priced in euros—or trapped behind bureaucratic walls. The Brazilian Medical Cannabis Association reports that fewer than 50,000 patients nationwide have legal prescriptions, despite an estimated 3 million who could benefit from treatment.

Meanwhile, those who access cannabis informally risk violence, incarceration, or worse. Just last week, a young singer in São Paulo was shot in the leg by a military police officer who claimed his suitcase "smelled like cannabis." No evidence. No crime. Just the familiar cocktail of suspicion and force.

A Foreign Plant, A Brazilian Story

Cannabis has no roots in the cosmologies of Brazil's Indigenous peoples. It is not native to this land, nor part of ancestral rituals like ayahuasca, rapé, or tobacco-based shamanism. Instead, it arrived here in the hulls of Portuguese slave ships.

Historical records show that cannabis was introduced to Brazil during the 16th and 17th centuries, not as medicine, but as a colonial commodity. Enslaved Africans from Angola and the Congo basin brought with them knowledge of cannabis as a plant for spiritual connection, physical relief, and social use. In many Bantu languages, it was called "diamba" or "liamba." On Brazilian soil, it took root in quilombos, in secret gardens behind senzalas, and in Afro-Brazilian cultural memory.

The state's suspicion crystallized into law during the early 20th century. The 1921 criminalization of cannabis coincided with post-abolition anxieties about Black independence and social control. Laws explicitly associated the plant with "vagrancy" and "delinquency"—coded language for Blackness and poverty. The repression was never about the plant. It was about the people using it.

This colonial legacy of racialized prohibition continues to shape enforcement today. While medical access is now legally permitted, the plant's Afro-Brazilian history is erased, its criminalized users remain incarcerated, and its cultivation is still largely outlawed.

Two Realities, One Substance

This historical trajectory helps explain Brazil's contradictory cannabis policy today. On one side, a carefully regulated clinic behind union gates, offering dignified care. On the other, the continuation of a war on drugs that disproportionately targets Black and poor Brazilians. Cannabis is medicine if prescribed, evidence if not. The substance doesn't change. The context does.

Though cannabis possession was technically "decriminalized" in 2006, the law left critical gaps—like failing to define the threshold between user and trafficker. The result is that decisions rest on police discretion, and data shows this discretion is anything but neutral. According to Brazil's National Penitentiary Department, over 60% of those arrested for cannabis-related offenses are Black, despite comprising only 19% of the population. Working-class youth are far more likely to be criminalized for small quantities than their upper-class counterparts carrying identical amounts.

Meanwhile, Brazil's prison population has swelled to over 750,000—the world's third-largest—with drug-related offenses accounting for nearly 30% of incarcerations. Most are for possession or small-scale trafficking of cannabis.

Turning Point or Isolated Island?

And yet—amid this contradiction—something is shifting.

The São Bernardo clinic is not an isolated gesture. It represents a proof of concept that drug policy doesn't have to be dictated by fear, punishment, or market logic. It can be guided by solidarity, care, and public interest. Unlike Colombia's medical cannabis boom or Uruguay's commercial model, Brazil's union-led approach shows that cannabis can be integrated into worker protection systems and community health models—not just high-end wellness brands or export agriculture.

This model opens the door for other unions, cooperatives, and municipal governments to follow suit. In rural areas where informal cannabis use is already common among agricultural workers for pain relief, similar partnerships could provide legal alternatives to criminalization. If a labor organization can offer this level of access without waiting for federal reform, then perhaps change will come not from Brasília, but from below—from the same grassroots movements that brought universal healthcare and workers' rights to Brazil in the first place.

The timing is significant. As Mexico moves toward full legalization and Argentina expands its medical program, Brazil risks being left behind in a region increasingly embracing cannabis reform. The union model offers a distinctly Brazilian path forward—one rooted in collective organizing rather than individual consumption or corporate profit.

From Criminalization to Care

There is still much to dismantle. Prisons remain full of people punished for what is now prescribed elsewhere. Police continue to use cannabis as a pretext for racialized violence. And Brazil's emerging legal cannabis industry risks becoming just another site of extraction—serving the few, locking out the many.

But something important happened in São Bernardo this week. A wall was punctured. A different future became visible. One where other unions might negotiate cannabis access as part of healthcare benefits. Where municipal governments could partner with therapeutic associations to serve low-income communities. Where the plant's healing potential is divorced from its criminalized past.

If Brazil can learn to look past the stigma, past the fear, and past the false dichotomy of "user" and "criminal," then perhaps the bullet won't be the last word. Perhaps what began behind a union gate can ripple outward—toward a model of health justice, where cannabis is not feared nor fetishized, but simply understood as a tool for healing.

And that future? It's already growing. Quietly. Legally. And this time, rooted in solidarity.