Drugs, Law, People, Place and the State

Ongoing regulation, resistance and change

Stewart Williams, Barney Warf

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367218621
• eBook ISBN: 9781351791090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Though any psychoactive substance can be revered or reviled as a drug, as people's cultural norms shift, ultimately its status is determined in law by the state. This publication explores the regulation of drugs – alcohol and cannabis to heroin and cocaine – and practices such as social drinking and public injecting under political regimes. Drugs are discussed in their geographical contexts: the colonial legacy of cannabis prohibition for bioprospecting in Africa; the veracity of the persistent notion of the narco-state; Turkey's governance of drinking amid civil unrest; and alcohol's place in the neoliberal political economy of Ireland. In addition, drug policies are examined: from problems in managing drug-related litter in the UK to supervised injecting facility provision in Australia; harm reduction in Canada; and the global network of drug policy activists. Place is significant, but porous borders, territorial overlaps and multi-scalar linkages are influential in remaking the world through current challenges to the 'war on drugs'. This book was originally published as a special issue of Space & Polity.

Drugs, law, people, place and the state: ongoing regulation, resistance and change

Stewart Williams^a and Barney Warf^b

^aSchool of Land and Food (Geography and Spatial Sciences Discipline), University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia; ^b Department of Geography, University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA

We introduce this special issue firstly by tracing drugs from their traditional, cultural and religious uses through to their roles as commodities in colonial relations and now the global economy. We secondly explore the shifting nature of drugs and drug use in different places and times as shaped by politics, especially state regulation and the law. Thirdly, given the complexity as well as contingency of drugs, we survey a wide range of relevant theoretical approaches, but suggest that a critical analysis attend to their spatial framing and geography. Fourthly, and finally, we summarize the eight papers comprising this collection.

Introduction

Drugs are variously perceived by people, and can therefore be valued in very different ways both within and among communities, institutions and nation-states. Yet they have been a significant element of social and political relations for eons. The tea plant, for example, was probably encountered first by prehistoric humans (Homo erectus) foraging for food, but its domestication was progressed across China and beyond by Buddhist, Confucian and Daoist monks discovering, as a result of their necessary participation in all-night meditation sessions, that beverages made from an infusion of tea leaves helps with concentration (Heiss & Heiss, 2007). Traditional drug use has often been religious in nature. The ingestion of coca leaves among the Inca, peyote buttons among many Native Americans, and cannabis flowers and resin among Hindu and Sufi holy men are longstanding and deeply enculturated practices (Schaefer & Furst, 1997; Warf, 2014).

Colonialism and the industrial revolution opened a dramatic new chapter in this story, however, as drug plants that once had meanings and uses associated with particular peoples and places were re-made as novel, exotic commodities for consumption by others elsewhere. Tobacco, introduced to the British by Native Americans, was simultaneously denounced as a “demonic vegetable” and embraced enthusiastically in the new custom of smoking. By the seventeenth century, write Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, it was “as if all the tobacco in the world was roaring in a great, brown tsunami up the Thames toward London” (1999, p. 99). Opium, then also being imported into Europe from afar, similarly became a commodity in high demand. It was increasingly used over the course of the nineteenth century and not just in the form traditionally smoked in the infamous dens encountered first in the East and later in the metropolitan West. Modern industrial chemistry, manufacturing, transportation, advertising and retailing made it possible for opium to be processed into array of medicinal tinctures, soothing elixirs, cough syrups and the like, which had substantial markets at home and abroad. Opium provided profits and pleasures (as well as pain relief, if required) to the individual importers and exporters as well as producers and consumers of such goods, but the greatest beneficiaries were the colonizing nation-states’ governments, which received significant revenues from its taxation. Indeed, these monies were so central to imperial coffers that British confrontations with the Chinese over their attempts to limit imports of this drug from India culminated in the Opium Wars of the 1840s and 1850s (Booth, 1996).

Today, of course, alcohol remains the most widely used drug in the world even though it is forbidden in some parts and known to have harmful effects (World Health Organization, 2014). Familiarity and accessibility can obscure the fact that it is a drug, but even relatively ubiquitous and seemingly benign commodities, including foodstuffs such as cocoa, chocolate and coffee, are also drugs (Goodman, 2007). Some drugs are synthetic, unlike these naturally occurring ones, and new psychoactive substances are constantly being invented. Their manufacture for illicit purposes is appealing because when first synthesized they have not yet been officially identified as drugs and there is a time lag often of several years before they might be made subject to any legal designation or regulatory measure. So-called legal highs or designer drugs have been promoted with vernacular names such as kronic, fantasy, grievous bodily harm and meowmeow, among others, and are sold on to recreational drug users in innovative ways, including via the Internet (especially the deep web) and using “bitcoin” type virtual currencies (Power, 2013; Taylor, 2015). These most recent of developments, enabled by new technologies, have arisen through individuals’ efforts to avoid detection and/or defer prosecution by the state, but then the structural processes behind once-familiar patterns of drug production, distribution and consumption, and their impacts and the societal responses to them, are subsequently now also reconfigured.

Drugs and drug use practices with longer histories and cultural associations can also be unsettled, and some are now turning up in expected places. Thus, for example, the importation, cultivation and use of khat by migrants from the Middle East and Africa are not necessarily illicit or intentionally clandestine activities but they certainly are controversial in this drug plant’s new homelands (Anderson, Beckerleg, Hailu, & Klein, 2007). Similarly, in Africa, there are cities that are now operating as major transit points in an ever-shifting, frequently re-routed global drugs trade; and some rural regions there have started to cultivate drug plants such as poppy and coca, which are otherwise endemic to and still primarily grown on continents other than Africa (Carrier & Klantschnig, 2012). Indeed, Courtwright (2002) charts a 500-year-long “psychoactive revolution” in which the diversity, availability, potency and popularity of drugs have all steadily increased. Such observations, above all, hint at the social and spatial unevenness and ever-changing nature of drugs and drug use. Especially relevant, as we explain further below, is the fact that drugs are invariably tied to cultural perceptions and misperceptions, reflecting contemporary social values and mores, while also being profoundly imbricated in the politics of institutionalized control as well as moral regulation.

What exactly constitutes a “drug” as something distinct from a food or medicine is largely a matter of historical and geographic context. The word is often taken to refer only to cultivated plant materials and manufactured products containing psychoactive chemicals which have been made illegal since deemed harmful to the individual and to society. The outlawing of any drug tends to happen quite haphazardly, but it is then also politically charged, and variously capricious or contradictory. As the social acceptance of any one particular drug or type of drug waxes and wanes over time, its legal status can shift accordingly. When this sort of change does occur, sometimes slowly, other times abruptly, it is often the result of political opportunism as much as any concern for public health. Irrespectively, however, the impacts are usually profound and extend far beyond the interests of the law and those authorities administering it.

The law, people, place and the state

The legality or illegality of drugs is a key factor in their constitution, but it varies among countries, and sometimes within them. Again, however, the distinction is a contingent one. Take, for example, the drug plant cannabis, also known as marijuana and in processed form as hashish. It was legal in most parts of the world until included in the League of Nations’ 1925 Geneva Convention on Opium and Other Drugs. International agreements of this type have continued ever since to make cannabis a globally prohibited drug, but the nation-states signatory to them must then pass their own laws which can then be interpreted and enforced in the specific contexts of those peoples and places over which they pertain.

In the USA, for example, the end of (alcohol’s) Prohibition in 1933 led to the demonization of cannabis as it was effectively criminalized with the Marijuana Stamp Act of 1936 and became the new raison d’être for drug enforcement agencies that had previously focused on alcohol. That nation-state’s regulation of cannabis and many other drugs throughout the twentieth century was an interdictory one, punctuated with “War on Drugs”, “Zero tolerance” and “Just say No” styles of policy campaign. Prohibition, illegality, criminalization and deterrence have similarly characterized the drug control regimes of most other nation-states (but not all of them or always; see, for example, McCann, 2008 on the more liberal alternatives of harm reduction). This is because they, like the USA, happen to be signatories to the three main international drug control treaties administered by the United Nations (UN) since 1961, 1971 and 1988, respectively. These international treaties are used to direct and frame (but can then also constrain) the approaches to drug control adopted by their signatory nation-states.

Establishing new drug laws and policies, and challenging extant ones, in any country must usually engage the national or federal legislature and judiciary as they hold supreme authority. However, change is still possible at the sub-national level. In the USA, cannabis is illegal under federal law, but its possession (in quantities of one ounce or less) has been progressively decriminalized in 24 states, starting with Oregon in 1973. A further advance was made in 2012 when both Colorado and Washington State legalized the drug for recreational use; they have since been joined by Alaska and Oregon. The use of cannabis for medical reasons is also legalized in the USA, with this reform extending to 23 states and the District of Columbia (Warf, 2014).

That a drug and its use on particular grounds is officially sanctioned inside the borders of the nation-state in one jurisdiction but not in another is an expression of the law’s power and constitutive force. It is similarly exemplified by the manufacture of opioids or narcotics, which is licit when conducted under license from the UN and generating revenue for the pharmaceutical industry’s powerful transnational corporations and their shareholders. These corporations gain recognition and legitimacy as they work with the government approval and support of licensed nationstates found mostly in the global North, but they also distinguish themselves from others in the global South, including millions of rural peasants whose livelihoods depend on cultivating poppy for the illegal drugs trade (Williams, 2010, 2013). On this basis, drugs such as codeine are differentiated and distanced from others such as heroin, even though heroin is legally available for hospital procedures in Australia and the UK, for example, whereas the possession and use of codeine suddenly becomes illegal in the hands of someone for whom it was not prescribed. Indeed, both of these drugs are derivatives of morphine, which is obtained from poppies, and therefore highly addictive; either one can be as problematic when irregularly obtained and used as it is effective when administered in a medical setting.

One might well wonder, in light of the above and regards drugs generally, as Goodman and Lovejoy (2007, p. 258) ask,

why is it that at certain times and in certain places, some substances have become illicit while others remain acceptable, both legally and socially? What explains the shifts in attitudes that affect political and cultural decisions? The boundary between licit and illicit has been permeable, as opium and tobacco both demonstrate, but how can we analyse the space for negotiation in the signification of substances as one type or the other?

Drugs have been at the centre of enormous political controversies for decades, and raise numerous important issues and thus questions that bear directly on policy. Why, for example, does the federal government of the USA subsidize tobacco, which kills 480,000 people in the country annually, but make cannabis a Schedule I drug comparable to heroin even though there is no evidence that it has ever killed anyone? Prescription drugs harm far more people than all illegal ones do worldwide, and yet their abuse is only weakly deterred because it is hard both to detect and to prove, cases do not always make it to court and those prosecutions that do succeed tend still only to see relatively minor penalties applied, perhaps due to the political power of pharmaceutical companies? Why did the neo-liberal “War on Drugs” backfire so miserably, filling jails and ruining lives? Do coca eradication efforts in Latin America help to stem the tide of cocaine? How are the geopolitics of Afghanistan’s Taliban and the global opium and heroin trade intertwined?

The authors of the papers presented here, like the collection’s editors, have long been concerned with such matters and therefore consider the legality of drugs in nuanced ways that progress beyond just looking at the vagaries of whether or not different societies simply accept the possession, use, manufacture and supply or trafficking of drugs. There is a need to probe the regulation of drugs more deeply because some of them can be subject to excessive controls due to moral panics, for example, whereas others might be much more readily overlooked because of the increasingly available options for discretion in policing. Some drugs and drug use, if riding a wave of social acceptance, will get to be decriminalized if not perhaps even legalized. Similarly, the blanket bans on drugs imposed by nation-states over their territories and citizens can provide exemptions in particular situations. At the same time, the nature of drugs and drug use continues to change. Any understanding of them and their impacts, and likewise of how they might best be managed, can therefore soon become anachronistic and out of place. Moreover, the drug trade, like so many other domains of social life, has become thoroughly globalized, with far-reaching effects.

Theoretical approaches to understanding drugs

The topic of drugs has been theorized from diverse conceptual perspectives. Beyond the neoclassical economic fantasy of explaining drug phenomena in terms of simplistic supply and demand models, it is evident that drug production, distribution and consumption have all been enfolded within wider understandings of class, gender, ethnicity and power. The Foucauldian sense of biopower, in which drugs may be seen as integral to the production and regulation of modern subjects, is a useful point of departure (Bergschmidt, 2004; Keane, 2009). Drug regulation has become an essential part of the neo-liberal state, and the policing of bodies – especially young, male, minority ones – is an integral part of attempts to control illegal drug use. Drugs and drug use are deeply political, and their legality or illegality is as much a matter of class and ethnicity as it is a public health concern.

A different view of drugs and drug use embeds them within the context of cultural ecology, notably attempts to bridge the once-solid divide between humans and plants and portray them as a seamlessly integrated totality (Hall & Hargrove, 2009; Head & Atchison, 2008). This approach, in line with broader reconceptualizations of the social production of nature as made, not given, has drawn on actor–network theory as inspired by Latour, Delanda and others. Drugs thus easily cross once-solid dichotomies such as natural/cultural, and are discursively repositioned as hybrids that defy such boundaries. Finally, given the poststructuralist emphasis on fluidity, drugs have been seen in light of globalized networks and assemblages that inseparably link actors as diverse as Peruvian coca farmers, heroin producers in Myanmar and Thailand, or cannabis growers in California and British Colombia with users in diverse locales around the world (Marez, 2004; Neilson & Bamyeh, 2009). This line of thought calls attention to the power relations that shape drug cultivation, manufacture and consumption, firmly uniting producers and users in a manner akin to commodity chain analysis. It also points to the differential geographies embedded within and produced by such linkages.

There is an inevitable spatiality to the drug phenomena noted above. It ranges from the setting of any one location, each with its own unique physical environment as well as proximities and distances relative to elsewhere, through to the symbolically and materially powerful spaces created through the territorial demarcations maybe of jurisdiction or, alternatively, arising from the affective experience associated with a more personal sense of place. A small but informative body of literature has therefore examined drugs from an explicitly geographic perspective (for overviews, see Taylor, Jasparro, & Mattson, 2013; Williams, 2014). This corpus ostensibly started with the influential research of Rengert (1996). It has since grown to comprise work examining many of the different landscapes of drug production (Hobbs, 1998; Steinberg, Hobbs, & Mathewson, 2004); the variously socio-cultural and political economic geographies of assorted drugs including opium, coca and amphetamines (Allen, 2005; Chouvy, 2009; Chouvy & Meissonnier, 2004); and drug addiction and its treatment and prevention (DeVerteu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
•   1  Drugs, law, people, place and the state: ongoing regulation, resistance and change
•   2  Drug laws, bioprospecting and the agricultural heritage of Cannabis in Africa
•   3  The myth of the narco-state
•   4  From rakı to ayran: regulating the place and practice of drinking in Turkey
•   5  Neoliberalism and the alcohol industry in Ireland
•   6  Colliding intervention in the spatial management of street-based injecting and drug-related litter within settings of public convenience (UK)
•   7  Space, scale and jurisdiction in health service provision for drug users: the legal geography of a supervised injecting facility
•   8  Political struggles on a frontier of harm reduction drug policy: geographies of constrained policy mobility
•   9  Mobilizing drug policy activism: conferences, convergence spaces and ephemeral fixtures in social movement mobilization
• 10  Conclusions
• Index