Do "você não pode" ao "você não quer": a emergência da prevenção às drogas na Educação

Abstract

This dissertation aims at understanding how school education has been assigned a social function related to practices of drug use, or, in other words, understanding how drug prevention has become a demand in the Education field, being prescribed as a content that must be included in school curricula. Taking the concept of governmentality, developed by Michel Foucault, as my main analytical tool, and inspired by his style of thinking and researching, I understand the emergence of drug prevention as an effect of a political rationality that takes each individual as a management object, as well as the population as a whole; that functions from a knowledge founded on the field of Economy, performing calculations in order to obtain the maximum efficiency with the least use of power and financial resources; finally, that constitutes itself in its effectiveness by means of an apparatus of techniques, knowledges, institutions, procedures, and specialists. This research has suggested, on the one hand, that drug prevention has become a school demand deriving from the very historical characteristics of that institution, potentially capable of instituting useful, docile subjects and circulating a power that, being more preventive than repressive, is more subtle and effective in conducting conducts and implementing techniques required for the production of a safe, healthy, productive society. On the other hand, drug use has become a school subject through its configuration as a "problem", from the strategic functioning of knowledges that, justifying and circulating a web of powers, have converted the prevention of practices of psychoactive substance use at school into a natural "issue".