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That’s what you read! More than a thousand people arrested for drug trafficking in Acre could be free today if the law was applied correctly. The data is not an invention of activist, nor of a “bandit defender”: it is in the official study of the National Council of Justice (CNJ), published in May 2025. Justice recognizes that small occasional, primary, without antecedents and out of factions are entitled to reduce the penalty provided for in article 33, §4, of the Drug Law. But in Acre, this right is systematically denied. While the national average of recognition of so -called privileged traffic is 26.1%, in our state the index plummeted to only 19.2%.
Privileged trafficking was introduced in Law No. 11,343 of 2006 (Drug Law) precisely to differentiate the great trafficker from the small seller or user who, in vulnerable situations, is framed in Article 33. He provides for the reduction of the sentence of a sixth to two -thirds when the defendant is primary, of good antecedents, is not dedicated to criminal criminal activity. The Federal Supreme Court, in 2023, consolidated this understanding in Binding Precedent No. 59, establishing that, recognized privileged trafficking, the penalty must be replaced by restrictive rights and the regime must be opened. In other words: If the defendant meets the requirements, he should not be behind the bars.
Many primary defendants in Acre remain incarcerated despite the right to privileged trafficking and recent STF decisions/Photo: Reproduction/Illustrative
The CNJ survey, based on the unified electronic execution system, pointed out that Brazil has about 370,000 convicted of trafficking and that only 96.7 thousand, the equivalent of 26.1%, received the benefit of privileged trafficking. In Acre, of the 5,408 convicts, only 1,039 had the benefit recognized. If the national average were applied, about 375 more people would be out of jail today. And these are not large traffickers, but primary defendants, arrested with small quantities, which should never be in the prison system.
The situation becomes even more serious with the recent decision of the Federal Supreme Court in RE 635.659, the subject 506 of the general repercussion, of 2024. The Court decided that the possession of up to 40 grams of marijuana or six female plants should be considered for personal use. In such cases, there is no crime, but mere administrative infraction. The ground was clear: criminalize the user violates fundamental rights to intimacy and private life, provided for in article 5 of the Constitution. This means that thousands of people arrested as “traffickers” should not even be processed as they carried quantities compatible with their own consumption.
In Acre, where the application of the fourth paragraph is even more restricted than in the rest of the country, the STF’s decision must have a devastating effect on the prison system: hundreds of processes can be reviewed, reducing penalties or extinguishing entire convictions. Keeping these people stuck is not only an injustice, but also a burden on families, a waste of public resources and a fuel for the strengthening of factions, which feeds precisely from the prison mass formed by poor young people and drug users.
The CNJ showed the numbers. The STF gave the interpretation. But none of this has automatic effect. The state will not, by its own initiative, open the doors of the cells. It is necessary that family members and stakeholders call justice to revise the proceedings, request recognition of privileged trafficking or reclassification for personal use.
More than a thousand people in Acre could be free now, but they are still stuck because the system insists on applying the law in a restrictive, selective, and punitivist manner. What the Supreme Court and the CNJ reveal is simple: there is an abyss between the law that exists on role and the reality of prisons. Therefore, those who have a family member or friend in this situation need to move. It is not to wait for the prosecutor or the judge. The system does not act alone (although it should). It is necessary to seek their own rights, with the help of expert criminalist lawyers, personal trust or recognized for the credibility between jurists. Only then will it be possible to transform judicial decision and law into concrete freedom.
*Roraima Rocha is a lawyer; Founding partner of MGR – Maia, Gouveia & Rocha Advogados; Master in Legal Studies with an emphasis on International Law; Specialist in Criminal and Criminal Law; Specialist in Civil Advocacy; Member of the Prerogatives Commission, Secretary-General Court of Ethics and Discipline-TED, and chairman of the OAB/AC Criminal Law Commission; and a member of the OAB National Human Rights Commission.
