The 2nd INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON PREVENTION OF PROBLEMS RELATED TO THE USE OF DRUGS (PREVINE 2017) will take place in Florianópolis (Santa Catarina) between 6 and 8 August 2017, and will bring together researchers, academics, professionals, policy makers and civil society. In partnership with the National Office of Policy on Drugs (Ministry of Justice and Citizenship), the event is organized by the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) and has as theme of its second edition “The various faces of violence in relation to the use of drugs.”

This proposal must be thought in all its complexity, in order to avoid the reproduction of simplifications such as the mere direct association of violence as consequence of drug use, without necessarily taking into consideration its possible determinants. In this sense, it is necessary to consider what is defined by structural violence, namely: a set of socio-cultural, economic and political processes that reproduce and perpetuate inequalities such as social ethnic and gender inequalities, which are almost always the reason of psychosocial vulnerabilities related to drug abuse. In this way, the interfaces with violence are multiple.

The horizons of our theme, which can vary in their most macro-determined scopes, are truly wide and comprise at one and the same time urban violence – here related to drug trafficking and traffic accidents, which now take more lives than many wars around the world – , community violence – involving groups in conflict in several territories -, as well as the facets of domestic and interpersonal violence, whose impacts on intrafamilial life may involve innumerable forms of hostilities, be it against women, against children, adolescents and even against the elderly. Such a structural context has spin-off effects such as mass incarceration, whose tools of criminal selectivity are based on cleavages of income, social class and color, as well as policies to sanitize urban centers, which affect populations exposed, for example, in the street situation.

In a perspective of integrality and that unites different sectors, preventing problems related to the use of alcohol and other drugs and promoting health require identifying, and acting on, the social determinants that, in the context of our theme, make some groups more susceptible to violence. Gender, sexual orientation, social class and ethnicity are conditions related to higher vulnerability and require the articulation of actions of social protection, education, culture, health and safety, aiming at the creation of service networks, programs and public policies that could break with the logic of the reproduction of violence and the maintenance of social exclusion by weaving the threads of psychosocial protection based on principles of bioethics and human rights.

PREVINE 2017 will seek to share knowledge and practical experiences that address the theme proposed, as well as several other aspects of practices in the AD field. Thus, the aim is to encourage debates, articulate research and subsidize public policies that strengthen citizenship, social ties, and community and service networks, which are bases for a society with less violence.