A group of Brazilians have been in Mississippi this week, seeking input on fighting drugs and alcohol in their country. One of their stops was Vicksburg.

The Monday visit was sponsored by the Make A Promise Coalition for a Drug-Free Warren County.

“We wanted to show them what the coalition does,” said Ninth Circuit Court District Attorney Ricky Smith, a coalition member. “The coalition tries to attack the problem at a very young age, the developmental age, and I think that’s very important.”

The visiting four, from the Sao Paulo Municipal Council for Public Policies on Drugs and Alcohol Policy, or COMUDA, are:

• Francisco Italico Buonafina, also a senior adviser to the Sao Paulo Municipal Housing Company board of directors;

• Jose Florentino Dos Santos Filho, president of COMUDA;

• Luiz Alberto Chaves Oliveira, also a pediatrician and counselor; and

• Mary Aparecida Rangel, also a psychologist and president of the Aracariguama City Drug Council.

They were accompanied by two U.S. Department of State interpreters, Anita Ferreira and Joseph McGovern.

The 12-day trip was organized by the State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program, and the group was to head to Los Angeles today. In Mississippi, they also visited agencies in the Jackson-metro area including the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility and the Developing Resources for Education in America agency, both in Pearl; Jackson State University; and the Mississippi Department of Mental Health.

“This council has as its objective to discuss policies on drugs and alcohol,” Dos Santos Filho said Monday. “We organize free conferences. We talk about the current situation and the needs that each region has in the areas of drugs and alcohol.”

Sao Paulo is the largest of Brazil’s 31 cities. Brazil, in South America, has 190 million residents who speak mainly Portuguese.

Sao Paulo is divided into regions, and they each lobby for laws that decrease drug and alcohol use among youths.

Leigh Cook is director of programs and services of Behavioral Health of Central Mississippi, which administers Make A Promise Coalition, a 25-member group of students, parents, social service agencies and community leaders.

“I think we have made an impact and we have worked, mainly, to inform parents about the dangers of teens drinking,” Cook said, “because a lot of people think it’s a right of passage.”

Smith, who handles criminal cases in Warren, Issaquena and Sharkey counties, says many are drug-related.

“A lot of home burglaries that you see are people trying to get property that they can sell to buy drugs,” he said. “If you lump all cases together in which the drugs have some component to it, it could easily be 80 percent of what we do. A lot of violent crimes are disagreements about drug transactions or those types of things.”