ROCKERS' ARREST FIRES UP CENSORSHIP ROW IN BRAZIL

RIO DE JANEIRO The call themselves Planet Hemp and make no apologies for
their smoldering passion.

"Planet Hemp still likes Mary Jane," the rockers sing on their hit,
"Burning Everything." Then the band's vocalist pleads, "Don't treat me like
a criminal."

That is just what federal police have done. The band has been arrested for
promoting drug use, prompting much of Brazil to flinch at the apparent
return of an ugly shred of the nation's repressive past.

As the young musicians sat in a Brasilia jail Thursday, congressmen chanted
drug lyrics on the legislature floor, and the band's supporters noted that
even President Fernando Henrique Cardoso has inhaled many times.

"It's a ridiculous situation, a censorship of opinion," said Marcelo
Lobatto, Planet Hemp's manager. "I just hope sanity eventually prevails."

The popular band's trip to the slammer began Saturday, when the Riobased
rockers performed a concert in Brasilia, the nation's capital. Federal
antidrug police in the audience aimed a video camera at the musicians when
they launched into their hit denouncing repression against marijuana users.

"Do you want to lock me up just because I smoke cannabis?" the song asks.
"...Traps won't do anything, brother. I won't fall into them."

Fall they did; minutes after the show ended, police arrested them and
delivered the concert tape to prosecutors.

"The law is the law, and it has to be applied," said Eric Castro, head of
the Brasilia federal antidrug unit. "Artists just don't understand that
these songs induce drug use."

Under Brazilian law, urging someone to commit a crime is a crime,
punishable by 3 to 15 years in prison. Alleged violators must await trial,
usually within 60 days, in jail.

Technically, the socalled "apoligist" law could be used against a person
who urged another to drive drunk or seek an abortion, also crimes in
Brazil, Castro said.

Such laws are dramatically different from those in the United States, where
band members could be prosecuted for invoking violence, for instance, only
if a lynch mob virtually followed them out of the concert hall,
constitutional experts said.

In 1992, rapper IceT pulled the song "Cop Killer" off of a CD by his punk
rock band, Body Count, under pressure from his label, Warner Bros. Records.

He would never have faced arrest, said David Straus, a University of
Chicago law expert. If the members of Planet Hemp had been jailed in the
United States, "They would have been out in hours and then sued the police,
who would have lost in an open and shut case," Strauss said.

"To prosecute in [the U.S.] you have to show a cause and effect
connection," he said. Just because the Grateful Dead speny years extolling
drugs while their audience smoked them, he said, "doesn't necessarily
establish cause and effect."

In Brazil, however, police only "basically need to prove the songs have
potential to make people use drugs," said Castro, of the federal police.

Since Saturday, Planet Hemp's wildhaired musicians singer Marcelo,
guitarist Rafael and bass and drum players Big Ant and Codfish have
lounged around a spacious jail cell in Brasilia, watching television
provided by Congressman Fernando Gabeira, the leader of a congressional
contingent that has long tried unsuccessfully to decriminalize marijuana. A
lawyer provided by the band's label, Sony Music, has so far had no luck
springing the four.

Gov. Cristovam Buarque was persuaded to halt the group's transfer Wednesday
to nearby Papuda prison after the outraged Gabeira complained that the
group shouldn't be housed with murderers and rapists.

Police said they had arranged the transfer mainly because other prisoners
in the jail lockup were angry over the group's TV privileges and were
threatening rebellion.

Artists from across Brazil, meanwhile, have converged on Congress in
Brasilia to protest the arrests or have sent messages of support by phone
or email.

"This is a police action from the dictatorship era," Djavan, a pop singer
told O Globo, a Rio newspaper. "This shows just how fragile democracy is in
our country."

What perplexes most Brazilians is why police waited so long to arrest Hemp
Planet, which has been churning out songs about drugs for more than three
years. Eleven of 17 songs on the band's first album concerned marijuana,
Lobatto said, and Planet Hemp's CDs are in record and discount stores from
Manaus to Sao Paulo.

"We had a lot of research to do," Castro said.

What didn't play a role, he insists, is another song by the group, "Pigs in
Uniform," which denounces police as cowards and murderers who see their job
as protecting Brazil's rich from its poor.

"This is not artistic censorship," insisted Rio Judge Carlos Biscaio, in an
interview in O Globo.

Planet Hemp's supporters aren't so sure. Brazil certainly has a growing
drug problem, they admit. Yet in a nation with a marijuanasmoking section
on Ipanema Beach, a president and his wife who freely admit inhaling in
their youth, and an international reputation for relaxed morals, this
week's arrrest makes no sense, they say.

"It has been 30 years since an artist was arrested and censored here,"
Lobatto said. "This is going backward."