Drog use, public opinion and morality: motivation and arguments based on use

Abstract

This article analyzes data from a national survey conducted in 2013, representative of the Brazilian population sixteen years and older, that looked at perceptions, practices and opinions pertaining to the use of psychoactive drugs in Brazil. It describes the behavior of different sociodemographic groups related to the consumption of alcohol, tobacco and illicit drugs and relates their behavior to an attitudinal scale built as a synthesis of eight variables of opinion on the consumption and politics of current illegal drugs. The article presents a multinomial logistic regression used to identify predictor variables of two positions that seem at first contradictory as far as dissonance between declared behavior and manifested attitude. One position being prohibitionist users of illicit drugs – supporters of present drug laws that criminalize consumption and prioritize a focus on the problem as being a question of public security – and the other being non-prohibitionists who do not use illicit drugs. This article analyzes these positions through the lens of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kolhberg’s constructivist psychosocial theory on morality and exposes the potential of these perspective to look at the discussion on public policy in regards to the universal phenomenon of the consumption of psychoactive substances.