This dissertation is aimed at unveiling the colonialist rationality of the war on drugs that has informed public security policy in the state of Rio de Janeiro since the end of the military regime. It is a theoretical study based on bibliographic, statistical, legislative, and, occasionally, journalistic sources. Its epistemological foundation is the concept of necropolitics, which Achille Mbembe developed as the gravitational center of a more comprehensive reflection on the modern world. Considering the period between 1988 and 2018, we demonstrate that the war on drugs in Rio de Janeiro is part of a racist mechanism that, backed by whiteness and propelled by the state violence typical of neoliberalism, sophisticatedly perpetuates the secular process of extermination of the poor and black people who live in the favelas and outskirts. This war moves and legitimizes, in impoverished urban areas, a governmental management through terror by exceeding the limits of power in order to kill, directly or indirectly, bodies deemed disposable and hostile, enemies of the Brazilian civilizing project, now embodied in the racially constructed image of the drug dealer. Prison and mass grave are seen as two basic manifestations of this genocidal dynamic in this context. This study further points to the importance of another way to deal with the drug issue, one that is different from war prohibitionism, without leaving aside the necessity of a radical critique of the war-like rationale that sustains it, which demands questioning both the neoliberal hegemony and the historical preservation of white privilege in Brazil.