Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, edged Lula in the first round and has named a cannabis executive as his pick for health minister. With the October 25 runoff days away, Brazil’s patient associations fear a market built for corporations, while investors see an opening in Latin America’s biggest economy.
Brazil is a geographic and industrial colossus of more than 200 million people, the largest economy in Latin America (and one of the 10 largest in the world) and a commercial powerhouse with the capacity to alter the balance of health and agricultural markets worldwide. In fact, on the global cannabis map, its size is anything but a secondary detail. Strictly speaking, with a potential consumer base numbering in the millions and a pharmaceutical sector with tremendous momentum, the South American country represents one of the most coveted and consequential economic frontiers for the international industry.
However, on the eve of the decisive presidential runoff between President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro on October 25, after Bolsonaro edged Lula in the October 4 first round with about 47% of valid votes to Lula’s 45%, the green giant finds itself at the intersection of structural changes, where the interests of multibillion-dollar corporations, human rights, business legal certainty and the day-to-day struggle of patient groups all intersect. What does Brazil’s cannabis landscape look like heading into this election?
To understand the scale of Brazil’s dilemma, we first have to look at the scale of its system and the impact of its regulation. In recent years, the National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) has built a regulatory framework that opened the door for pharmacies to carry products derived from the plant and promoted the development of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) at public universities and labs.
However, this institutional rollout is now at a turning point. Gabriel de Lucía Murga, a communications and public relations expert focused on the cannabis industry in Brazil and Latin America, sees two clearly defined paths depending on who prevails at the polls. In the specialist’s view, a Lula victory in the second round would deepen the path that has been developing in the industry, respecting Anvisa’s resolutions for university scientific research, cultivation focused on the production of pharmaceutical ingredients and the long-awaited regulation that would allow associations and NGOs to cultivate and produce preparations for patients with a medical prescription.
Against that institutional inertia, the figure of Flávio Bolsonaro introduces a perspective that is particularly attractive to sectors of industry, private investment and the free market. Far from a dogmatic shutdown, the right-wing candidate has hinted at a pragmatic vision focused on economic deregulation and openness to large-scale business activity. A key indication of this orientation is Claudio Lottenberg, whom Flávio named in August as his pick for health minister, a physician with a technical background who is CEO of the medical cannabis company Endogen.
“That’s something he has pointed to, but we don’t have any guarantee that he will be his health minister. We would have a signal that he is not going to close the door on cannabis in Brazil,” Murga warns. This approach offers certainty to transnational and pharmaceutical investors seeking clear rules of the game, strict oversight and investment security without the uncertainties associated with informal activism. Still, the analyst recalls that the institutional memory of Bolsonarismo raises doubts among social activists: during the administration of Jair Bolsonaro, the father of the current presidential candidate, the Ministry of Health released official reports questioning the therapeutic use of cannabis, highlighting a contrast between the corporate pragmatism promised by the son and the father’s traditional rhetoric.
This crossroads not only measures the commercial appetite of global markets, but also the survival of a unique community-based model in the region, where thousands of families grow cannabis collectively to supply themselves with therapeutic oils in the face of the prohibitive costs of importing. Ítalo Coelho, a lawyer specializing in Criminal Law, a master’s student in Public Health at the Federal University of Ceará and a former state drug policy adviser, points out that under Lula’s current government, progress was made through Anvisa on crucial but unfinished regulation, that would require maintaining continuity in leadership at public health agencies.
“This policy is under threat, there’s no way around it. Conservatives are against associations growing marijuana,” Coelho says, stressing that in states such as São Paulo, political pressure against patient groups is already being felt strongly while large industrial players are being given almost exclusive priority. For the specialist, a Flávio Bolsonaro victory would definitively tip the balance toward strengthening major economic benefits for industrial players and attracting corporate investment. Even if Lula wins, Coelho warns, progress will not be free of obstacles due to a Congress with a deeply conservative majority.
At the heart of the contest are two opposing visions of the role of the state in a large-scale economy. Cauê Pinheiro Costa de Alencar, a psychologist at the Federal University of Paraíba and coordinator of the cannabis association Acaflor, emphasizes the urgency of dispelling the misinformation circulating in the final stretch of the campaign. Pinheiro Costa argues that Lula’s reelection would create a much more favorable environment for discussion, although he clarifies that no progress by Brazil’s cannabis movement has been a gift from the political class, but rather the direct result of popular mobilization, activism by mothers and mass marches in urban centers.
Meanwhile, Pinheiro Costa recalls that the concepts of harm reduction and health education were historic pillars introduced into public administration during Lula’s first term. And he warns that a rise in conservatism would paralyze state and federal legislation supporting non-industrial medicinal use. “There is a possibility that, in the event of a Flávio Bolsonaro victory, the processes will become increasingly slow-moving,” he points out, noting that while Lula has shown himself receptive to community-based therapeutic use, the parliamentary right wing, represented by the Liberal Party (PL) prefers to prioritize traditional ethical and legal frameworks.
The Federal Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling decriminalizing marijuana possession for personal use adds another layer of tension to a market of enormous scale. Emílio Figueiredo, a lawyer specializing in cannabis and psychedelics and a member of the Rede Jurídica pela Reforma da Política de Drogas, lays out the electoral dilemma bluntly. On one side is the option of a president who did not obstruct judicial decisions or social activism; on the other is the candidacy of Flávio Bolsonaro, which proposes a framework centered on economic and industrial acceleration that, while well suited to positioning Brazil as an exporting power and energizing agribusiness, is criticized by the lawyer because he believes it primarily benefits financial market speculators.
The disparity between the path opened to transnational capital and the vulnerability of local communities is laid bare in the day-to-day workings of the justice system. Maurício Gomes, a lawyer and legal director of Acaflor in João Pessoa, Paraíba, describes the gulf separating the business and community-based models. While the Superior Court of Justice and Anvisa are structuring streamlined administrative channels for industrial hemp businesses and multinational companies—a field where Bolsonaro’s economic program promises to provide even greater momentum and market incentives—small community organizations are surviving in a dangerous regulatory limbo, exposed to the lack of effective implementation of RDC 1.014 (a regulatory sandbox meant to test small-scale, non-industrial cultivation, the pathway associations are counting on) and to the hollowing out of the working groups promised by the state.
This bureaucratic asymmetry translates into real vulnerability: while big capital receives commercial authorizations, associations face the constant threat of police raids and seizures. In addition, Gomes underscores the racial and social dimension of this conflict in a country where cannabis enforcement has historically been tied to the harassment of marginalized communities. For Gomes, the law-and-order rhetoric accompanying Bolsonaro’s party—which backed a constitutional amendment in the Senate criminalizing unauthorized possession—seeks to provide institutional strength in the face of drug trafficking, although it ultimately affects the dynamics of grassroots community organizations.
At the same time, this apparent dichotomy between an agribusiness-oriented right and a regulatory left conceals even deeper internal fractures. Débora Aguiar, a human rights activist and former city councilor in Recife, offers a critical perspective on how traditional politics approaches the cannabis agenda. “The far right approaches the marijuana debate through lobbying with pharmaceutical industries and agribusiness,” the activist says. “You see the far right co-opting activists and, especially, relatives and mothers of atypical people, appropriating the cause to commodify pain and work in favor of capitalism.”
For the former councilor, alongside this corporate expansion there is “a political left that still marginalizes the debate over marijuana and sees this space as something not as relevant as it should consider it”, leaving fertile ground that the right is quick to occupy. In that sense, Aguiar emphasizes that the prohibitionist rhetoric promoted by Bolsonarismo only deepens the historic persecution of Black, Indigenous and marginalized people, perpetuating a system of mass incarceration. “When we analyze all the extremism, we see the two places marijuana occupies: that of capitalist commodification and that of wars,” Aguiar concludes.
With all this in mind, Brazil does not simply stand as another market debating between prohibition and openness. In fact, it is probably the key piece that will define the volume, direction and ethics of the cannabis trade throughout Latin America. Now, at this precise moment in history, the ballot box will determine not only the name of the next president, but also the development model that the region’s most populous country will adopt: whether it becomes an agro-industrial and pharmaceutical powerhouse driven by the free market and the attraction of corporate investment, or chooses a model with greater state intervention focused on integrating public health, social justice and associative access to the plant.
