This thesis argues that prohibitionist policies are embedded in a colonial-modern rationality of violent social control and that regulatory processes focused on medical alternatives do not necessarily break away from this logic. The research is situated within the field of International Politics by analyzing the prohibition of cannabis in the context of international drug regulation, in which Brazil plays an active role in its establishment and refinement. Furthermore, the debate on alternatives converges with global trends toward regulatory flexibility for cannabis, both for medical and adult use, driven by a market logic. Based on a genealogical study of the (re)articulations in the medical-police-judicial discursive fields, we observe the construction of regimes of justification for the emergence, circulation, and transformation of prohibitionist knowledge that sustains the violent models of social control in Brazil. To analyze the scope and limits of the regulation of medical cannabis as an alternative, we investigate the tensions surrounding the associativist formulas emerging from the state of Paraíba, in northeastern Brazil, which permeate the circuit of critical mobilizations against the inefficiency of prohibitionist policies. However, the impact of patient associations’ structures on violent social control models has been limited by a colonial-modern rationality. As an analytical strategy, we delve into three normative acts that express the specificities of the prohibition of cannabis in Brazil, as well as highlight the contributions and attempts to align with international drug regulation, namely: the Pito de Pango Law (1830), Decree No. 20,930 (1932) and the Drug Law (2006). We consider these normative acts as genealogical events that capture power struggles over the exercise of social control through drug regulation, exposing how (dis)authorization dynamics in the medical discursive field legitimize a set of discriminatory practices that characterize the violent performances of police-judicial authorities. This research argues that the disauthorization of patient associations reveals a dynamic of resistance and a concern among dominant actors regarding the critical nature of associativist formulas, which challenge the limitations imposed by global prohibitionist policies. On the other hand, despite the construction of credibility around demands for cannabis-based treatments, alternatives strictly based on medical-therapeutic consumption may be capturedto medicalize life, thereby maintaining the criminalization of non-medicinal consumption as a control strategy and as a justification for violence against peripheral populations.