Notes about the modalities of social intervention facing lesions and deaths caused by traffic accidents related to the consumption of alcoholic beverages

• Published in: Saúde e sociedade 2017-04, Vol.26 (2), p.556
• Main Author: de Medeiros, Marcilio Sandro
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Accidents; Alcohol; Alcoholic beverages; Beverages; Biopolitics; Communication; Consciousness; Democratization; Disability; Driving under the influence; Drunk driving; Drunkenness; DUI; Entrepreneurship; Fatalities; Fines & penalties; Foucault, Michel; Health care expenditures; Health problems; Health promotion; Individual collective relationship; Legislation; Neoliberalism; Private sphere; Production consumption relationship; Public health; Rationality; Risk behavior; Subjectivity; Traffic; Traffic accidents & safety; Vehicles; Violence
• ISSN: 0104-1290; 1984-0470
• DOI: 10.1590/S0104-12902017157721

This essay aims to reflect, in the light of the concepts of biopower and symbolic market, on the modalities of social intervention in facing of lesions and deaths caused by traffic accidents related to the consumption of alcoholic beverages. The study identified that the two State initiatives in reducing lesions and deaths from traffic accidents involving drunk driving act on risk management, which is a new perspective at the regulatory framework that defines the contemporary citizen (homo medicus). Thus, the responsibility to eradicate risk behavior is transferred to individuals, encouraging them to increasingly behave like entrepreneurs of themselves and their health, life, and environment, which constitutes biossociability determined by the Structure of Biopower, as announced by Michel Foucault. Driving a vehicle under the influence of alcoholic beverages is determined by a logic of production and consumption organized by the logic of economic agents that have on media communication their main dissemination vector. The subjectivity of the symbolic market designed by this logic is protected through legal and financial apparatus of the State, whose content focuses on capitalist accumulation, at the expense of health. It also extols the figure of the consumercitizen within the regulatory and neoliberal rationality that overvalues the individuality in the private sphere and does not promote the engagement with civic potential of consumption or the approximation of individuals with collective problems.