Every Apr. 20, cannabis culture marks its unofficial holiday, a date that, depending on where you are, means anything from a smoke session in the park to a political rally demanding legalization. In Brazil, 4/20 has always carried a particular tension. The country has one of the largest cannabis consumer bases in Latin America, with an estimated 2.8 million regular adult users and a medicinal market that hit 853 million Brazilian real in 2024 alone. Last June, the Supreme Court decriminalized personal possession of up to 40 grams. And yet the plant remains deeply politicized, still tied to race, policing, and who gets criminalized. Brazilian music has been living inside that tension for 30 years. What’s changed is how it sounds.
On Nov. 8, 1997, after playing to nearly 7,000 people at the Minas Tênis Clube in Brasília, Brazilian rap group Planet Hemp walked off the stage and was taken directly to a police cell. The charge: promoting drug use. Marcelo D2, Black Alien, and the other four members spent five days behind bars. Their records were confiscated, and 14 songs were banned from local radio. Ironically, the judge who signed the arrest warrant was later convicted of taking a bribe from a drug trafficker.
But Planet Hemp was never simply a band about weed. As Marcelo D2 explained in a recent interview: “The point of Planet Hemp was never just ‘let’s smoke weed and get high.’ The political question, the drug trade, illegality, those always mattered more to us. It’s what puts the Black majority in prison, what sends police into the favelas to massacre people.” In the same interview, BNegão, the group’s co-vocalist, put it even more plainly: “We took cannabis off the crime pages and put it on the dinner table.” The Brasília arrest wasn’t a fluke; it was the peak of a years-long campaign that included shows canceled across eight states, CDs seized, and conservative politicians lobbying to censor the music outright.
Other artists of the same era found subtler ways in. O Rappa’s cover of “Erva Vendida,” composed by Jards Macalé and Wally Salomão during the darkest years of the military dictatorship, was first recorded by Gal Costa in 1971 before the band gave it new life. It sounds like a vendor calling out at a street fair—herbs that heal, herbs that soothe—with the word “vapor” doing double duty as both steam and the local slang for weed. The censors missed it. The audience didn’t. That same encoded language runs through Bezerra da Silva’s samba from the ‘90s–“Erva Proibida” and “A Fumaça Já Subiu na Cuca” are songs about the plant dressed in allegory because there was no other way to get them out.
By the 2000s, the disguise started to come off. The funk proibidão that leaked out of Rio’s favelas and into national circulation spoke plainly about drugs as part of daily life—not as politics, but as landscape. MCs like Mc Primo and Mc Felipe Boladão weren’t making arguments about legalization, but describing the world they lived in. Cannabis in songs like“Bola da Vez” and “Residência dos Loucos” was inseparable from the urban reality the music came from: the same reality that put people in prison for holding it.
What happened next wasn’t a sudden shift but a slow dispersal. As the legalization debate moved into courts and Congress, medicinal use expanded, and middle-class consumption stopped being invisible—the plant started appearing in music that had nothing to prove. By the late 2010s, it had reached the pop mainstream. And mainstream pop, by definition, doesn’t make arguments.
In 2019, Ludmilla released “Verdinha,” a funk track so unapologetically about weed that it prompted a Senate debate and cost her a brand sponsorship, while also getting her face printed on bags of marijuana sold in Rio. The same year, Anitta and Ludmilla released “Onda Diferente” with Snoop Dogg, a song built entirely around the aesthetic of getting high, delivered as pure party. Neither song contains a manifesto. Neither needs one.
That same year, trap and the new wave of Brazilian rap extended the logic further. On “Kenny G,” Matuê used the American saxophonist’s name as slang for smoking: the cigar shape became the instrument, the reference became an inside joke, and weed slipped into the same frame as double Rolexes, whisky, and money. No argument. The reference assumes you already know, already belong. On “Máquina do Tempo,” off the same album, “20 grams of hash, nobody understood anything” sits alongside a Sunday burning gasoline and a trip back to the ‘70s to smoke a joint with his father-in-law—detail of atmosphere, not cause. In Baco Exu do Blues’s “4 da Manhã em Salvador,” the smell of weed and coke shares a verse with a crying child and gunshots outside. It’s one element of an urban scene, rendered without editorial comment.
Black Alien, who was arrested alongside his Planet Hemp bandmates in Brasília, embodies the whole arc. When he built a solo career—especially on 2019’s Abaixo de Zero: Hello Hell—the subject didn’t disappear but became autobiographical. “Music is what hurt my drug career,” he said in one interview about the album. “I was addicted long before I wrote my first verse.” The plant stopped working as a collective symbol and became one man’s story.
The distance between Planet Hemp’s Brasília arrest and where things stand now is perhaps best captured by Marcelo D2 himself, who in 2023 launched MD2 Hemp Flowers, a cannabis line sold at dispensaries in California and Florida. In an interview, he described smoking legally on a New York street next to a cop without incident—something unimaginable in 1997. It’s a detail that lands less as a business story and more as a measure of how much ground has shifted.
In Brazil, the fight isn’t over—drug trafficking convictions still fall disproportionately on Black and poor people, and Congress could still roll back what the Supreme Court established. But what’s shifted in Brazilian music reflects something real: cannabis no longer has to justify its presence in the culture. It just had to outlast the people trying to silence it.