Power and Illicit Drugs in the Global South

Maziyar Ghiabi, Maziyar Ghiabi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429836350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

More than a hundred years have passed since the adoption of the first prohibitionist laws on drugs. Increasingly, the edifice of international drug control and laws is vacillating under pressures of reform. Scholarship on drugs history and policy has had a tendency to look at the issue mostly in the Western hemisphere of the globe or to privilege Western narratives of drugs and drugs policy. This volume instead turns this approach upside down and makes an intellectual attempt to redefine the subject of drugs in the Global South. Opium, heroin, cannabis, hashish, methamphetamines and khat are among the drugs discussed in the contributions to the volume, which spans from Sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia, including the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America and the Indian Subcontinent. The volume also makes a powerful case for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of drugs by juxtaposing the work of historians, political scientists, geographers, anthropologists and criminologists. Ultimately, this edited volume is a rich and diverse collection of new case studies, which opens up venues for further research.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

INTRODUCTION

Spirit and being: interdisciplinary reflections on drugs across history and politics

Maziyar Ghiabi

ABSTRACT

Few commodities are as global as drugs. Cannabis, opium, heroin, amphetamines, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), khat, psychedelic cacti and mushrooms as well as an interminable list of other natural or synthesised substances travel and are consumed around the globe for all possible reasons. Human migration, trade, cultural trends, medical practice, political repression: together they constitute the drug phenomenon today – and indeed in much of human history. In this, drugs are spirit-like commodities, their value resting upon a fundamental ambiguity made up of individual, psychological, social, cultural, economic and medical circumstances. Defining a drug is an attempt at defining a spirit on the edge, which metamorphoses in time and space. At the same time, drugs remain a fundamentally political object. They are substances controlled by states, through mechanisms of policing, legitimated by judicial and medical evaluation, condemned often on moral grounds. Situated between a fluid social existence and a static legal dimension, drugs can become inspiring hermeneutic objects of study.

Alternative interpretations of misery and oppression need to re-channel the debates around culture and poverty to more exciting theoretical arenas that reframe material reality’s relationship to ideology and redefine how social process emerges in the confrontation between structure and agency.

Bourgois, “Just Another Night in a Shooting Gallery,” 43.

Few commodities are as global as drugs. Cannabis, opium, heroin, amphetamines, Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), khat, psychedelic cacti and mushrooms as well as an interminable list of other natural or synthesised substances travel and are consumed around the globe for all possible reasons. Human migration, trade, cultural trends, medical practice, political repression: together they constitute the drug phenomenon today – and indeed in much of human history. In this, drugs are spirit-like commodities, their value resting upon a fundamental ambiguity made up of individual, psychological, social, cultural, economic and medical circumstances. Defining a drug is an attempt at defining a spirit on the edge, which metamorphoses in time and space. At the same time, drugs remain a fundamentally political object. They are substances controlled by states, through mechanisms of policing, legitimated by judicial and medical evaluation, condemned often on moral grounds. Situated between a fluid social existence and a static legal dimension, drugs can become inspiring hermeneutic objects of study.

Yet academe has systematically left scholarship dealing with drugs to a corner of the whole, especially in the social sciences. Drug scholarship is met with curiosity and anecdotal interest. These feelings are a reflexive spasm at the heart of which stands a formalistic understanding of social sciences and humanities, one that narrows the scope of social and political phenomena to univocal manifestations. The ambiguous nature of drugs in the modern world and their transversal effect are seen as dispensable oddities in a world made up of institutional records, leadership personalities, econometric stats and epidemiological surveys. Can social scientists and humanities scholars dispense drugs as a side note of bigger questions around the social and the political?

In October 2016, 12 scholars coming from different disciplinary backgrounds gathered in Oxford at St Antony’s College to test the potentials and perils of interdisciplinarity in drug research. The event, sponsored by the Wellcome Trust Small Grant for Society & Ethics, took the form of a symposium titled ‘Drugs, Politics and Society in the Global South’, which later gave the name to this special issue. The primary objective was not that of simply producing new analytical and descriptive knowledge to be added to the annals of drug studies. The goal, instead, was to build through an interdisciplinary platform fresh insight into the study of the modern and contemporary world. Historians, political scientists, urban and cultural anthropologists, geographers, criminologists and medical anthropologists enlivened the discussion for two days. Rather than gathering a list of the usual suspects working on drugs, the symposium enabled a venue for the encounter of a unique blend of multiple disciplines. The blending of these different approaches resulted in a polyvocal and multi-faceted engagement around and within the phenomenon of drugs. Drugs became a frame, a lens, through which one could interpret and relocate broader historical and epistemological questions.¹

On the benefits of interdisciplinarity, academic departments have long been informed. The consumed edge of disciplines is often where new knowledge is produced, but there is more in sight for the heterodox seekers. It is the intellectual encounter, even when rowdy and disharmonious, between different disciplines that salutes the production of episteme and the unleashing of new interpretations. The fields opened up by this volume remain in fieri: made of multiple disciplinary approaches, this volume hands the reader and the researcher a rich basket of primary material. The archival notes of Indian, Mexican and Egyptian narcotic officials and medical practitioners are prelude to the field notes in rehabilitation and treatment centres in contemporary Iran and Peru and to the interviews with poppy cultivators in Afghanistan, the khat and cannabis consumers in East and West Africa and gang dealers in Nicaragua, as well as to the geospatial images of cropped lands in Central Asia and the prohibition dictums in the south-east. This unparalleled methodological landscape speaks firmly about the plurality of the drug phenomenon and on the open-ended horizon in front of those willing to engage with it. In this sprit, the contributions that propped up the symposium aim at integrating drugs – and their annexed realities – within the social sciences and humanities, by addressing larger questions around history, power, society and life. After all, how can one pretend to understand contemporary drugs policy and drug worlds without acknowledging the historical dimension of drug phenomena? Or else, how can we realistically speak of drugs in modern cities if we do not look at the life of drug use(rs) in praxis?

Before introducing the volume’s contributions, I would like to direct the readers’ attention towards a few contextual and theoretical particulars that animate this special issue.

What is the drug situation?

‘Farcical’ and ‘delusionary’ are two ways that one could describe the ways governments, throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, attempted to counter the market of illicit drugs or to depict drugs as essentially and exclusively evil.² The latter of these attempts is readily provided by the 2017 World Drug Report, published by the main United Nations (UN) anti-narcotic body United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), where it is argued that ‘the magnitude of the harm caused by drug is underlined by the estimated 28 million years [sic!] of “healthy” life … lost worldwide in 2015 as a result of premature death and disability caused by drug use’.³ The data is intended to produce a state of alertness in the reader and to convince them that drugs are a serious cause of danger and harm in today’s world. That said, a few pages onwards the report dedicates a small section to incarceration and the institution of prisons. It says that of the many millions of people who are incarcerated every year around the world, around 20% of them use drugs,⁴ with drug use in prison being notoriously more dangerous due to riskier modes of consumption (ie injection). This said, one is invited to ponder about drugs being a serious danger for people in prison, which they effectively are. Yet a second thought is indispensable: isn’t drug crime a primary cause of incarceration worldwide?⁵

This model of thought, which by 2017 has developed a certain level of sophistication – exemplified by the provision of complex data on ‘life loss’, for instance – remains at the heart of knowledge production about drugs in governmental institutions. After more than a hundred years since the first Opium Control conventions in Shanghai (1909) and The Hague (1911), drugs policy and, with it, drug scholarship has gone through a moment of reflection and transformation – perhaps the transition to a new cultural era about drugs. A consensus has been reached, rather unanimously, on the failure of the status quo: the legitimacy of prohibition of drugs, as enunciated by North American officials in the 1960s and 1970s with Richard Nixon and, with greater emphasis, in the 1980s with Ronald Regan, has expired. For those who had announced the crumbling of the prohibitionist regime,⁶ Uruguay’s president Pepe Mujica’s bold steps towards legal regulation of cannabis in Uruguay symbolised a sui generis Judgement Day. Contextually came also the recreational and medical cannabis laws in the northern part of the Americas, which so far has resisted the regressive tide embodied by Donald Trump’s election to the US presidency in 2016. Variants of these examples are in progress in other parts of the globe, including Europe where the Portuguese government had led the drug decriminalisation camp since the late 1990s. Other cases may be less obvious: the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is discussed in the special issue, has opened up discussions about the possibility of managing drug consumption through state intervention and is currently introducing ‘safe injection rooms’ for heroin users; Latin American heads of state, from Colombia and Mexico to Bolivia and Guatemala, have expressed support for an alternative model to the US-led ‘War on Drugs’. If there is a time for renewal of policy models vis-à-vis drugs, it ought to be the coming decade.

Reform of international strategy towards illicit drugs does not exhaust the rationale behind its discriminating power. At the other end of the spectrum of reform stands the militarisation of drugs policy to which the United States has historically been faithful and which has recently enlisted among its ranks the Philippines’ president Rodrigo Duterte. The latter has manifested his auspices of nothing short of the physical cleansing of ‘drug addicts’ from the face of the Earth. To do so, he has legitimated law enforcement to shoot on sight suspected drug users and drug dealers. If not taken down, drug criminals are taken to overcrowded prisons, where they exist in degraded human conditions. The result is several thousand cadavers, including dozens of teenagers.⁷ His vision is not exceptional, even though his means may be for now. Being tough on drug users is a policy position hard to reform after several decades of systemic demonisation of drugs in the modern world. Evidence of this is given by drug reformers themselves. Proponents of cannabis regulation and legalisation are often forgetful that cannabis represents a small share in the economy of punishment of drug prohibition. Especially in the West, cannabis represents the bourgeois milieu of consumption, the one affected less systematically by policing and prison. Were cannabis legalised, the core of prohibition, its assemblage of crime/punishment, would remain in place, perhaps even more powerfully against vulnerable social classes, and categories already the object of criminalisation.

War on drugs is no metaphor. Fought with weapons, armies, police and an array of media, medical and justice tools, this war has nonetheless an allegorical dimension. It is not a war on drugs as most of the governments and international agencies involved in it declare. The objective of the combat is other than the chemical substance or the psychophysical state the substance induces. The targets of this system are the categories deemed worthy of punishment. With some generalisation: Black and Hispanic people in the United States; Arabs and Africans of the suburbs in Europe; poor, rural, indigenous and marginal populations in Latin America; proletariats and precariats in Africa and Asia – transversally poor, marginal, unorthodox, subaltern groups of humans around the globe. The rich and bourgeois classes are practically left untouched by the ‘War on Drugs’, unless they feel emotionally involved in some narco-saga on Netflix.

To this institutional violence produced by state enforcement of drug laws, there are other competing forms of violence. One is the violence of criminal organisations and drug traffickers. This violence is largely symbiotic and contextual to the ‘War on Drugs’, as it is reproduced within ecologies of contention between state and criminality. The other side of drug violence is that of ‘addiction’. An object of caricature in state-led discourse and propaganda, addiction remains both a governmental concept⁸ and a biomedical(ised) datum. Its violence is intimate and diffused at the same time, as it touches upon individual psyche and familiar/societal lived experience. Yet its violence is rendered more dramatic by the encounter with a system of prohibition which outlaws the biomedical existence of the condition itself: a drug user dependent on a certain illegal substance suffers from his/her condition and, simultaneously, from that of illegality (with its more nefarious consequences: police, prison and punishment). These different forms of violence all fall within a line of continuity; indeed, they belong to the same line of existence, which the special issue discusses in its plurality.

The insistence on the multidimensionality of the drug phenomenon is a key component of the following contributions. After all, what is a drug and what is addiction remain questions with unclear answers. The definitions of drug and addiction are not only tied to a political, legal interpretation; they are also connected to the ambivalent boundaries of medical knowledge. One should carefully ...