Foreign Natives: Psychoactivity,Policing,and the Elusive Corporeality of the Post-Soviet Rave

Introduction

In recent years, scholars have given increasing attention to the specificity of rave as a socio-cultural phenomenon and made numerous attempts to historicize it in different national contexts (Anderson & Kavanaugh, 2007; Mills, 2018). The psychoactive side of the rave experience often features quite prominently in both vernacular, popular, and scholarly accounts (Clark, 2019; Garcia, 2016; Lee & Paterline, 2006). At the same time, this direction of research has largely tended to focus on prominent rave locations in the Anglo-Saxon world or continental Europe (Berlin). By focusing on the rave subculture of St. Petersburg in the 1990s, this article extends the discussion to the post-socialist context and demonstrates how new forms of psychoactive control and resistance emerged in the wake of the Soviet collapse.

The bodily aspect is of particular importance in this discussion. Aas (2006) identified the body in its various physiological manifestations as a primary source of identity and control in the contemporary era. Nancy D. Campbell and Elizabeth Ettorre concentrate specifically on “embodied deviance,” noting that socially problematic behavior is increasingly understood as “manifest[ing] in the very substance of the deviant body” (Campbell & Ettorre, 2011, p. 161). Building on these conceptualizations, in the following discussion we operate with the concept of “rave body” which can be defined as an amalgam of various corporeal practices and features attributed to the participants of rave events. Importantly, this notion can both emanate from within the subculture as well as be prescribed from outside. In the latter case, it is usually with pejorative connotations and can be seen as part of the “embodied deviance” discourse. We propose the notion of “algorithm” of rave body identification to account for these “outsider” attempts to define and read the rave body, especially in the case of law enforcement agents who were faced with a difficult task of prosecuting the evasive “crime” in the absence of advanced technologies of drug control.

Overall, this article advances a new understanding of psychoactive corporeality as both a weapon of resistance and a tool of control. In examining these dynamics, we draw on STS and feminist new materialist approaches to drugs and drug use (Aas, 2006; Campbell, 2000; Campbell & Ettorre, 2011; Ettorre, 2007; Van der Ploeg, 2005) and examine a wide range of published and unpublished sources including memoirs, press materials, early Internet archives, and publicly printed interviews with the participants of post-Soviet raves—as well as some visual sources (photographs, video materials). We start by examining the psychoactive space of post-Soviet rave and new corporeal alternatives to the emerging neoliberal gender and economic order that it brought about. We further show how the law enforcement sought to utilize this corporeal aspect of drug use to compensate for the lack of technological solutions in the wake of the Soviet collapse.

Theoretical Background

This article builds on influential literature that examines the growing importance of the body and bodily identification in late 20th and early 21st century societies. While acknowledging the longer (and often sinister) histories of bodily identification, Irma Van der Ploeg (2005) and Katja Franko Aas (2006) demonstrated that it is especially in the recent era of “securitization” that modern (primarily Western) governments increasingly started to rely on biometric data for the purposes of identification and classification of citizens and aliens. The authors refrain from the overly optimistic embracing of the new technologies and instead point out the new risks, social boundaries, and power asymmetries that they create. While Van der Ploeg and Aas concentrate especially on the cases of asylum seekers and migrants, there is also important discussion of the practices of drug testing. For example, Aas (2006, pp. 149, 153) repeatedly emphasizes the “indignity” of the procedure and further stresses the emotional impact that it might have on the individual. At the same time, it warns about its impersonal and overtly technological character that usually does not take the social and cultural context into account.

Similar calls for bringing in the wider social context in the discussions of psychoactive drug use are present in the work of STS feminist scholars such as Nancy D. Campbell and Elizabeth Ettorre. Importantly, both researchers call for the more nuanced examination of the gendered aspects of contemporary drug policies. For example, in her influential book “Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice” Campbell (2000) traced how, over the course of the 20th century, the menacing figure of the “female drug addict” was culturally constructed to reflect the political, economic, gender, and racial anxieties of the era. Importantly, both Campbell (2000) and Campbell and Ettorre (2011) critically examine the role that science has played in the process, noting the many instances on which scientific evidence has been misused or misinterpreted to better fit the status quo. Crucially for the purposes of the present article, Ettorre (2007) and Campbell and Ettorre (2011) both emphasize the importance of the body in these discussions and introduce a new notion of “embodied deviance” as a tool of subversion and protest against oppressive policies. This approach will be of use in our subsequent analysis of the post-Soviet “rave body” as simultaneously an object of control and an instrument of resistance.

Methods and Sources

Overall, the materials used in our study can be distributed into two large categories—the narrative and the visual ones. As for the former, these include publicly printed interviews with the post-Soviet rave participants featuring their unique experience of encountering the psychoactive side of rave. The visual sources analyzed in our study include photographs and video materials. Since the rave corporeality is often characterized by outside observers as “elusive” and “difficult to define,” we stipulate that the visual analysis can in some instances provide additional insights.

For this article, two primary sources are of particular importance. First, it is the Ptiuch magazine which served as the main outlet for the Russian techno community in the 1990s. On the surface, Ptiuch was a typical underground monthly fanzine that was also widespread in the Western rave scene. However, in the post-Soviet context, this particular publication managed to attract a much wider audience (almost becoming a mainstream youth magazine) and also to monopolize the techno publishing scene in Russia. While Western rave and fanzine culture readily embraced DIY principles and repeatedly emphasized the “amateur” character of its publications (Erikstrup & Røstvik, 2018), Ptiuch became hugely popular in the 1990s and achieved a seemingly unthinkable unity of “style” and “avant-garde,” “subculture” and “underground.” For the purposes of this paper, we examined the issues published between 1995 and 2000, the period when the magazine achieved the peak of its popularity.

Ptiuch articles often contain visual materials such as photographs made by regular rave participants themselves. As discussed above, visual materials can serve as valuable sources on the psychoactive side of the rave experience and its representations (Bredow, 2006; Denk & von Thülen, 2014). Scholars of popular culture suggest that visual sources are key to understanding the character of underground events, the participants’ “style,” and, ultimately, the community’s “ideology” (Guerra & Moreira, 2015). In the case of post-Soviet rave, photographs do help in clarifying the composition of the public and the organization of space during the event. Such details are often omitted in the more conventional textual sources yet have important implications for our analysis.

In addition to Ptiuch, we also draw upon articles in the more conservative outlets such as Kommersant. These publications allow us to revisit the practices of state control that were still widespread in post-Soviet society. This aspect of Russian nightlife in the 1990s was emphasized by anthropologists. For example, in his article analyzing rave as a factor in transforming practices of control and identity, Yurchak (1999, p. 78) argues that the illegal status of a particular practice greatly influences the behavior of its adepts and often determines the ideology of an underground community.

The second important source is the book Reivoliutsiia (Stogov, 2010), the title itself being a creative portmanteau of reiv [rave] and revoliutsiia [revolution]. Written by journalist, translator, and radio host Il’ia Stogov and self-styled as a “techno novel” [roman v stile tekhno], it presents a peculiar case mixing oral history interviews with the participants of the post-Soviet rave with fictionalized elements and documentary evidence. These narratives can be approached as an alternative, a response to the authorities’ official position, a constructed collective memory on the rave social space and its “average” participants, and even as a form of “underground folklore.” Accordingly, it in many ways resembles the “polyphonic” prose of Belarusian writer and 2015 Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Aleksievich which also relies heavily on the voices of her interlocutors to create a “collective testimony” (Karpusheva, 2017; Lenart-Cheng, 2020; Lindbladh, 2017; Marchesini, 2017). Recognizing the many challenges involved in dealing with such sources, we still find it possible to use them in our analysis as a portal to the “experience” side of the post-Soviet rave.

In addition to the aforementioned sources, we also rely on the interview about rave raids practices that a former law enforcement officer and a lawyer gave to Meduza news portal (Pavperov, 2018). We also tried to arrange oral history interviews with those participating in raves and rave raids in the 1990s ourselves, but have been unsuccessful so far. We speculate that our focus on the illegal psychoactive component of the rave experience further complicated the search for potential interlocutors.

As historians, we approach these diverse materials as primary sources that narrate the many aspects of the Russian 1990s. Importantly, some of these sources were created already in the 21st century and thus may be compared to memoirs which offer a temporally mediated view of the historical reality. We do not necessarily see this as a problem but rather situate our analysis within a larger cultural history domain and the recent trend of historicization of the 1990s, including in the post-Soviet context (Sun & Liew, 2019; Tazhidinova, 2018). Contrasting various contemporary narratives with the more recent recollections, we seek to reconstruct the multi-faceted reality of the period and trace the changing meanings and images of the psychoactive and the corporeal in the wake of the Soviet collapse.

Background and Context: Making Rave “Russian”

The experience of encountering the psychoactive side of post-Soviet rave mostly covers corporeal practices which can be considered typical in this space and indicate the consequences of drug use (mostly, the use of ecstasy or MDMA, the most popular drug in the global ravers’ subculture). MDMA has been a particularly important drug for several reasons. First, it synaesthetically co-acts with the rave music to create a feeling of being present literally “within the sound.” The use of MDMA results in complex patterns of moving that can not be reduced to a series of simple separate actions—especially, “techno dancing” that combines a specific posture, a manner of dancing, and a certain emotional attitude. Importantly, MDMA is a highly social drug that creates a massive emotional outburst of empathy and fosters an unprecedented degree of connection in the crowd. Significantly, the pattern of showing affection and emphasizing unity among rave participants would often imply touching and cuddling—yet rarely in a sexualized manner. All these characteristics were further embedded in a peculiar spatiality and temporality that was characteristic of the post-Soviet rave.

Rave venues were in many ways designed in opposition to traditional dancing areas, and, unlike in the “outer world,” the “rave body” and its accompanying behavioral practices were not labeled as (simply) “misuse” of drugs. On the contrary, “techno dancing” and massive outbursts of empathy were normalized in this scene, while the typical socially acceptable behavior would likely be perceived as extraneous and, therefore, not welcome. At the same time, police in post-Soviet St. Petersburg, being massively underfunded and having to rely on cheap tools instead of complex drug testing technologies, also learned to “read” the rave body as a sign of drug mis/use and as a warrant for prosecution. We propose to situate this “police gaze” within a longer infamous history of interpreting human bodies and their sensory dimensions as signs of potential criminality or dangerousness (Courtine & Haroche, 1988; Smith, 2006)—as well as within the (post)-Soviet DIY tradition (Vasilyeva, 2019).

The ability to perform “techno dancing” has been a crucial aspect that constituted the essence of a “rave body” on equal terms with the other features forming this complex socio-cultural state. It becomes even more apparent when recollecting the history of the one of the first and most prominent rave clubs in post-Soviet St. Petersburg, “Tanzpol” [literally, Dancefloor; in Russian, pol can mean both “floor” and “sex”]. In “Corporation Happiness: The History of Russian Rave” its author Andrei Haas, one of the club’s founders, explains the polysemantic meaning of the word: “It bears a few meanings. First of all, it stands for dancefloor, the location where all the dancing is performed. Secondly, pol in it is the same as ‘sex’ in English, meaning species or something like that. The species of the man dancing. Understand?” (Haas, 2018, p. 29) For Haas, post-Soviet “rave bodies” literally transmutated into a new kind of human species, one that would be defined by its dancing behavior.

As we can see, the idea of a “rave body” as a unique human species characterized by its ability to dance in a specific manner (Homo ballans in some sense) was inherent to the commencement of the rave culture in post-Soviet Russia. However, when examining the interviews with its participants we once again cannot discern any particular indications of the manner of moving or dancing itself. Peculiarly, the majority of the accounts frequently focus mostly on the appearance and costume of the dancers and, in an important way, on the visual impression they created. Konstantin Petrov, relating to his first experience of participation in a “techno dance,” only recounts that “strictly speaking, it could not have been called a dance, we just let ourselves go.” However, referring to the visual characteristics of the activity, he provides a relatively more detailed account: “We were dressed in total white, wore dark glasses and looked really progressive to the average onlooker of the time” (Stogov, 2010, p. 41).

As regards the focus on appearance and style, it is hugely important in the comparative context of the matter and “place” of rave in post-soviet Russia and in the Western underground scene. For instance, comparing the rave culture specific to the Western scene and one inherent to the post-Soviet one, one can conclude that the former mostly represents an example of ideal underground movement orienting itself on the DIY culture and deliberately ignoring the visual aesthetics, such as the design of the locations where raves took place or the visual appearance of the participants (Collin, 1997; Ott & Herman, 2003). On the contrary, the performative aspect seems to have been connected with more importance in the post-Soviet scene. In fact, as Ilya Stogov mentions in his interview for the Russian documentary “All This Rave,” “rave-culture in Russia was more of an artistic branch of the initial underground movement.” In order to illustrate his thought, he provides a few examples of the raves that were perceived as independent artistic shows or even avant-garde art. One of the most illustrative cases he recollects is the party organized by the Haas brothers in the above-mentioned rave club “Tanzpol,” during which the ordinary visitors were dancing along with the professional ballet dancers specially hired for this purpose.

Further examining the rave participants’ accounts, one can conclude that the design of the location where the rave was about to take place and the visuality of both the “techno dance” and its performers were equally important to the organizers, for they constituted the conceptual whole. As Alexei Haas points out in “Corporation Happiness,” the design of the club’s wall which was central to the dance floor was crucial to him due to its special role and meaning (Haas, 2018, p. 31). Meanwhile, sharing his personal experience of organizing a “rave performance,” rave-club founder Alexander Massalsky discusses a successfully embodied project of the “circus rave” during which the participants should have danced right on the arena, like the real actors of the circus. According to him, he asked the circus administration for permission to organize a show in the corresponding settings with the following words: “We are artists, and we want to organize the event that will not be comparable to anything. It is called rave” (Stogov, 2010, p. 72). Indeed, while dancing along with the acrobats, clowns, and other actors in this performative show, the participants of the rave were to become the actors themselves who with the help of the circus decorations would create the performance by means of their mere participation. Thus, defining the rave as incomparable to anything, Alexander Massalsky was undoubtedly right at least in the context of the post-Soviet rave’s comparison to the Western scene. While still being the core of the rave’s concept, “rave bodies” of the post-Soviet rave at the same time became the crucial constituents of the indivisible performance and started to possess some performative features themselves.

Turning to the visual sources, namely, photographs made during the raves by their organizers or regular participants (such as Haas), one can definitely notice the intentionally creative design of the locations where the photos were taken. Furthermore, the unusual artistic looks of the ravers, evidently created in order to draw attention and/or fulfill certain performative tasks, become just as much discernible (see Russkii reiv, 2010).

Thus, it is possible to assume that among the features of the “rave body” in the post-Soviet scene one can mention not only such elusive and hitherto too complex to define aspects (such as an ability to be involved in a “techno dance” and specific emotional attitude), but also a relatively specific belonging to a certain social group of artists and actors or, generally, diverse performers. This was the social group, members of which were most likely to fit in the unusual performative aspect of the post-Soviet rave and to become its part, to participate in the design of the rave decorations, and to create such decorations with their own participation and appearance.

Not surprisingly, the same aspect of the “rave body” that was used in terms of the rave space for the means of self-identification could be used as the reason for prosecution by the police. According to Oleg Azelitsky, a prominent figure of the post-Soviet rave culture and a popular DJ of the time, once, during the police raid in the “Tunnel” rave club, the extravagant invited DJ unexpectedly happened to be the only participant who obviously suffered the misfortune. Having been told to lie with his face against the floor, he still disregarded the instructions and, lifting up his head in order to “fulfill his artistic curiosity,” he was hit on the head by the rifle’s butt (Stogov, 2010, p. 141).

Since post-Soviet rave tradition put a greater emphasis on the performative aspect of rave, the role of techno (or any other) component, unlike in Western tradition (Garcia, 2016), could not be called fundamental. Consequently, other socio-cultural practices which occupied a fairly local niche in terms of the Western rave gradually became more and more imbalanced in the post-Soviet scene. Possibly the most unstable position among them was occupied by the practice of drug use (Derikot, 2019). This could be the main factor that at first provided the post-Soviet police with the list of the more or less evident physiological characteristics of the “rave body” (pupils’ dilation and dehydration of the organism) that could become the sufficient condition for the prosecution.

Detecting and Concealing Drug-Using Bodies

How did police in post-Soviet Russia learn to “read” the rave body as a sign of drug mis/use? In what ways did they distinguish the rave body from the regular, “lawful” one? Presumably, materials covering the practice of drug raids, which were not uncommon in the rave clubs of post-Soviet Moscow and Saint Petersburg, can provide some answers. Naturally, the accounts of rave participants may prove useful as well as those of the police, both of them supplementing each other as regards the description of the practice. The police, being massively underfunded and having to rely on cheap tools instead of complex drug testing technologies, strived to improve the algorithm of identifying the rave body. At the same time, those functioning as rave bodies themselves were occupied with the task of figuring out and, thus, evading the procedure applied by the authorities.

The question of the main interest regarding the algorithm of rave body identification appears to concern the theory or principles on which it can be based and in accordance with which applied. However, the authors of the articles appearing in Ptiuch magazine from 1995 to 2000 tend to judge this algorithm as absolutely groundless and to deny the very possibility of formulating such principles. For instance, the article “Dotting the E’s” in the once regular column “Drugs” suggests that defining the “altered state,” an elusive characteristic of rave body and, therefore, a warrant for prosecution, is normally a meaningless task. According to the article, only police officers and doctors were not deterred by this obstacle from desperately trying to solve the problem (Rasstavliaia tochki nad E, 1997).

Sometimes the Ptiuch articles even deride the procedure of rave body identification by presenting it in an absurd manner. It is indicative that the first reader’s letter that appears in the short-lived column “The biggest humiliation” tells the story of a might-have-been prosecution. Describing the situation, the author of this letter argues that everything can draw the unwanted attention of the police on its search for the rave body, including the harmless process of urination (Detali, 1999). Emphasis on the absurdity of the algorithm is also often placed by Il’ia Stogov’s Reivoliutsiia interlocutors, most of whom were active participants of the rave movement in post-Soviet Moscow and Saint Petersburg. For example, Alexander Massalsky describes the events preceding an ordinary arrest as a relatively chaotic procedure during which everyone was loaded on the police cars (Stogov, 2010, p. 57). Similarly, Denis Medvedev depicts the process as a result of which all the people without distinction were led out into the street and laid down directly on the snow (Stogov, 2010, p. 230).

Thus, Ptiuch normally focuses on the doubtful nature of the algorithm of rave body identification. Instead, the authors of the accounts it publishes tend to regard the rave body as a hardly definable phenomenon. Nevertheless, some mentions of physical characteristics noticeable to those functioning as rave bodies as well as to the police striving to identify them also can be found in Ptiuch. Among them are dilated pupils and intolerable thirst, which compels its “victims” to always have a bottle of mineral water close at hand (Rasstavliaia tochki nad E, 1997). While both symptoms can be confirmed by resembling reports of specialists (Collin, 1997; Saunders, 1996), they also appear in the accounts of Reivoliutsiia respondents. As regards the second sign, the promoter Pavel Stogar even admits the economic loss in which the drug use of the rave’s participants usually results for him. According to his account, rave bodies can be managed without anything except for a bottle of water for up to 12 hr, which affects the bar’s earnings in a negative way (Stogov, 2010, p. 259).

As a result, despite mentioning some obvious physiological criteria, both Ptiuch and Reivoliutsiia question the legitimacy of the algorithm of rave body identification. However, their active involvement in the discussion of the latter can serve as evidence of this practice’s wide application. Curiously, from 1997 the increase in the Ptiuch articles covering the discussion of the algorithm coincides with the gradual disappearance of the once permanent column “Drugs.” Still, despite the active debates, it remains unclear, which exact signs of the rave body (except for the dilated pupils and thirst) must have been identified as a warrant for prosecution. Unfortunately, seems like even the inspection of the accessible accounts of the police itself cannot provide a satisfactory explanation.

In their interview for Meduza, the former servant of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Michail Golichenko and the lawyer Alexander Zheleznikov mention the so-called “new technology,” which law enforcement officers started to apply, as the need for drug raids increased. According to them, it implied the secret intrusion of the police agents into the “rave environment.” While the ground floor of the club was transformed into a drug laboratory, the police officers observed the ravers pretending to act like regular visitors themselves. In case of someone’s “unusual” behavior, the suspect was taken downstairs. Afterward, if the drug use as the cause of such conduct was confirmed, it was considered as a sufficient warrant for prosecution (Pavperov, 2018). Frustratingly, the exact meaning implied by “unusual” behavior is again passed over in silence. In particular, it remains unclear, what could serve as a criterion of “suspiciousness.”

Still, whatever such criteria may be, the author of the 1996 article on the trial of drug dealers for the popular post-Soviet newspaper Kommersant joins those questioning the efficiency of the above-mentioned technology. According to the author’s opinion, the main “weak spot” of the latter is the ability of experienced ravers to distinguish the police agents from the regular visitors (Vrantseva, 1996). Still, hardly effective as this practice appears to be, it serves not only as evidence of the authorities striving to control drug use. Moreover, this practice may be interpreted as a wish to understand the phenomenon of rave body through the mimetic process as a necessary component of learning and knowing (Taussig, 1993).

Hence, the article in Kommersant as well as the majority of other sources suggests the perception of the rave body as a phenomenon that cannot be reduced to the list of particular physiological symptoms. As the criticism of the technology demonstrates, it was not enough to simply mimic the characteristics to be counted as one of the ravers. Logically, it suggests the importance of an elusive emotional attitude inherent to an authentic raver and difficult to define or copy. This psycho-social aspect of participation in rave is described by Nicholas Saunders as a unique “electric sense of connection” that may emerge even among strangers. According to the scholar, the only necessary condition it requires is the authentic interaction with the music and other visitors (Saunders, 1996, p. 35).

Some of the Reivoliutsiia respondents connect this authenticity in terms of the drug user’s description with a certain animalistic trace. For example, Lena Popova equals being a rave body to turning into an animal (Stogov, 2010, p. 173). The idea of changing beyond recognition or even “returning to one’s origins” also cannot be considered rare. Anzhela Shulzhenko illustrates such a miraculous effect by an example of hardcore criminals that turn into the “frightened boys who want to open their souls to you” due to the effect of a single MDMA tablet while participating in a rave (Stogov, 2010, p. 173). Correspondingly, Simon Reynolds mentions that those functioning as rave bodies can be “guessed” based on them showing affection to one another and emphasizing unity. Typically, the latter implies touching and cuddling, although never a sexual approach (Reynolds, 1998, p. 88).

To sum up, the accounts covering the practice of rave body identification, regardless of their origin on one side or another, consider rave body a phenomenon that cannot be precisely described or reduced to a list of separate physiological symptoms. Nevertheless, the sources still allow discerning a couple of common characteristics based on which the process of identification might have taken place. The pupils’ dilation and their specific reaction to light, which can be ascertained with the help of an ordinary flash-light, can be listed among them; the dehydration of the organism leading to severe thirst as well. The symptoms mentioned can be confirmed in the specific literature. However, they appear to present only the tip of the iceberg that is challenging to be brought to the surface on the mere basis of the accessible sources. Presumably, documents from the archives of the police offices on drugs and crimes could prove useful in clarifying the term “suspicious behavior.” However, it is impossible to get access to them and, therefore, analyze them at the moment. Thus, this study strives to mark the prospects of productive research in terms of the rave body phenomenon in particular and underground culture in post-Soviet Russia more generally.

Making Sense of the Post-Soviet Rave

This paper discussed the peculiar form of psychoactive corporeality that emerged in rave spaces of Moscow and St. Petersburg in the wake of the Soviet collapse. We traced how this new drug-using rave body was both readily acknowledged by the contemporaries and pronounced notably elusive to define. The post-Soviet police, faced with the unfamiliar and daunting task of prosecuting drug crime in the absence of material resources and modern technologies, relied heavily on improvisational and DIY techniques to detect and indict drug-using individuals. While the details of many of these “special operations” remain unclear for the time being, we can state that these practices exhibited both certain resourcefulness and a distinct arbitrariness—both qualities that are often discussed in connection to (post)Soviet society and the state.

We would like to note, however, that the emphasis on DIY techniques and the seeming randomness of drug policing should not be seen as exclusively characteristic of the Russian 1990s. Rather, the broader implication of this particular case study is relevant for other national and temporal contexts where new psychoactive drug scenes emerge, underfunded law enforcement agencies struggle to fulfill apprehension quotas, and possibilities for technological innovation remain limited. In such settings, more often than not the human body itself becomes the material infrastructure of drug use and control par excellence—clearly visible yet at the same time almost indefinable.

Building on literature about drug use and control measures, we thus suggest that the socio-material approach in drug research should always be sensitive toward and incorporate the bodily aspects of both drug control and resistance. We highlighted the ways in which the body could be both seen celebratorily as a marker of belonging and critically examined by the law enforcement to produce evidence of criminal behavior in the absence of the more advanced technological solutions. Crucially, we suggest that both of these strategies need to be seen in their spatio-temporal and ultimately historical context—further accounting for the ways in which the shifting material conditions produce new opportunities and limitations for both drug control and resistance.