Marijuana and Social Representations in Newspaper’s Articles

Marijuana is a controversial and polysemic social object in Brazil, which is constantly discussed in the media. This study aimed to analyze the construction of social representations of marijuana from 489 articles of the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo (2010-2012). The data were treated with the software ALCESTE and analyzed based on six lexical fields organized in two thematic axes: police repression to drug trafficking and normative tensions of the medicinal and recreational use. The discourses raise individual and collective dimensions related to the legal status of the object, its uses and forms of social control - coercive and normative - that symbolically inscribe marijuana in social disputes of identities, practices and institutions.