Abstract
The War on Drugs and The Global Colour Line (2018) is a collection of papers, edited by Kojo Koram, concerned primarily with drugs that have been listed as a prohibited substance by juridical institutions and colonial empires. In a direct challenge to the US (political and intellectual) narrative of the ‘War on Drugs’, the contributors tackle and expose how different drug prohibition regimes construct and reconstruct race in Canada, South Africa, Indonesia, and Columbia – to name a few countries featured.
The term ‘global’ loosely encapsulates the transnational and international in this book. Indeed, it is international law that most chapters focus on. A common structure to many of the chapters starts with an introduction to the ‘domestic’ drug law of a particular country, and its cooperation with international treaties and conventions, followed then by a historical or socio-legal study of a subject unique to that country, grounded in critical race theory.
There is no attempt at comparative analysis, which in some ways benefits the book as it allows the chapters to remain devoted to their individual countries. However, it is a missed opportunity that they do not reference or respond to one another, as they do share some common perspectives and insights. Mainly, this book will interest legal scholars in the field of international law but also practitioners and researchers in search for materials to shift drug policy within a racial justice framework. This is not to suggest The War on Drugs and The Global Colour Line offers a blueprint to how to change law or policy, rather this important book provides an index of colonial ‘lawfare’ and drug prohibition political regimes.
Koram and the book’s contributors expose how normative formations, cultural narratives, and political programmes have drawn from and uphold historical myths, legal fictions, and moral economies of racial schemas. The endeavour of the book is in ‘truth-telling’ (in the words of contributor Pettus) and it pursues to report evidence of the wrongs, injustices, and violences of a global political order. The essential sections of the book are found in the commentary on the the hybridity of international and domestic law for each country. Unfortunately however all the contributors conform to the conceptualisation of race as social difference that, as Denise Ferreira da Silva points out in her own work (2007), does not account for the way onto-epistemological productions of race is constituted by scientific reason.
According to Koram, to maintain global hegemony after WW2 drug prohibition was designed by international political institutions as a ‘universal legal project’ (2018: 3). For him, it is no coincidence, ‘UN legislation that established drug prohibition as a global norm was produced in the same era as the UN legislation that claimed to eliminate racial discrimination’ (2018: 11). Pettus looks in closer detail at how the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs 1961 emanated from drug control treaties of colonial empires and delineated licit and illicit drug production and use. In effect, the Single Convention ‘enclose[d]’ ‘the (worldwide) commons of the natural resources’ to supply ‘the production of ‘narcotic drugs’ for medicinal use’ (2018: 201).
In Canada, this enclosure, reinforced by the Cannabis Act 2018, preserves whiteness through the financial and civic restrictions of cannabis production. Responsible and financially wealthy citizens are permitted to produce and use cannabis, thus rewarding white people, but punishing Black and Indigenous working class young people under racial profiling and civic penalties. This is hidden behind what Wohlbold and Moore term ‘benevolent whiteness’. A typical policy of benevolent whiteness is maintaining the binary of public health and criminalisation particularly in debates on drugs. Wohlbold and Moore point out ‘that health interventions regarding drug use are often tightly bound to criminal justice responses’ (Koram, 2018: 26). This combination of public health and criminal justice is a result of Canada, along with many other countries, adopting ‘a medical model of punishment’ (2018: 34).
The values of this narco-juridical model would be assimilated into the Brasilian Constitution of 1988. Duarte and da Silva Freitas describe a contradiction of ‘permanence/rupture’ within the Constitution. Brasil did not depart from the norms of its military rule but realigned authoritarian law within a liberal human rights framework. Another term Duarte and da Silva Freitas use for this transitional reform is ‘unconstitutional mutation’, leading to ‘hyper-incarceration’ of young Black people and ‘social legitimation of the institutions that had developed throughout the dictatorship’ (2018: 81). The category of ‘heinous crimes’, upon which drug trafficking is attached, makes ‘possible the legislative creation of a criminal law of exception’ (2018: 68) and provides the state to justify and authorise militarised police to manage urban areas as war zones. This is ‘a return to the 1941 Code’s system – which had been abolished in 1977 – of compulsory procedural arrest for certain offences, regardless of reasonable justification’ (2018: 78).
Similarly, in Indonesia ‘drug offences are recorded as ‘extraordinary crimes’’, as Fransiska informs (2018: 177). The characterisation as such of drug crimes are attributable to Dutch colonialism, that produced and associated ‘early ideas of the danger of drug cultivation, consumption and distribution’ to the ‘native’ population (2018: 177). Fransiska applies a human rights framework to her analysis, finding the Indonesia administration failing to adhere to principles of proportionality and non-discrimination in its drug laws and enforcement.
However, as Guardiola-Rivera and Koram point out, speaking in particular Columbia, the ‘War on Drugs […] cannot be fully comprehended within the classic categories of post-war liberal international law, such as human rights or transitional justice’ (2018: 130). They imagine and offer a different way of studying and writing about the War on Drugs. ‘[E]ver since violence and war have come to be the one and only true religion in the land of our childhood, it has become impossible to know with certainty whether to count ourselves among the living’ (2018: 134). Influenced by Walter Benjamin, Guardiola-Rivera and Koram decide to ‘remain in a state of entanglement’ (2018: 136), an entanglement not merely of the War on Drugs and counterinsurgency, but of the debris that breaks out from and away state violence.
‘The War on Drugs in Columbia’ Guardiola-Rivera and Koram explain, ‘is but the latest war in a chronology of war’ (2018: 134); it ‘is a war against all that is non-human, which collapses the drug, the environment and the Indigenous or Afro-Colombian into one, in defence of a narrow conception of what is human’ (2018: 137). There is a danger that in this description all these differences collapse whereby the non-human becomes a universal signifier of negation. Moreover, in such conceptualisations, the non-human is regarded as unlivable, as though we should aspire to the category of human so long as it is broadened to include different people.
Additionally, non-human as denoting the ‘dehumanised’ compounds blackness and race. Koram in his introduction replaces race for blackness in his summation of Frank Wilderson, writing ‘there is no ontology of the racial other’ (2018: 9). As Fanon would strongly point out, it is blackness that is of no ontology. Rather disappointingly The War on Drugs and The Global Colour Line does not engage with current discussions and debates in the field of Black studies, Indigenous studies, Queer studies, or Trans studies. ‘The project of racism’, Koram contends, ‘was the attempt to push specific human bodies outside the realm of human relations, to turn being into non-being’ (2018: 9). Yet for Black people they never have had being in the first place for it to be turned into non-being. This is why racialisation is such an inadequate concept in studying the dispossession of Black and Indigeous people.
In an edited book it is understandable, almost welcome so as to generate discussion, for contributors to use different conceptualisations of a term. However, it can get to the point where the term loses critical meaning. Through the lens of racialisation, Chowdhury explains the ‘over-policing’ of the Notting Hill Carnival (the ‘Black Party’) compared to the Secret Garden Party (a White, ‘boutique festival’) as an example of racial disparity. ‘[T]he foundations of the differential drug policing strategies are racialized such that they [the police] make presumptions about the subjectivities of the festivals’ participants’ (2018: 53). The suggestion here is that police act on prejudicial views based on how a drug strategy is operated, although the confusion is whether racialisation is to be understood as a cause or an effect – or both. Indeed, the concept of racialisation is invariably caught within a (scientific) logic of causality (factors and outcomes).
Duarte and da Silva Freitas follow a similar theoretical position that recalls label theory. ‘One impact of drug policy’ they observe, ‘on Black people is the forms of police approach and urban policing practices which result from how public security professionals construct their representations of suspects’ (2018: 82–83). Here, racialisation is a discursive formation. ‘The connection between the image of the ‘junkie’ – irrational and violent – and the ex-slave – dangerous and hostile – reveals the cognitive foundation around which judges, police officers, prosecutors, and public authorities in general, organise their activities and form their understanding of the idea of public order and control of urban scenarios’ (2018: 92). If there is a connection between the stereotype and its qualities, how is this connection maintained? Moreover, to what extent does this reveal awaken the consciousness of the political order, or for that matter haunt its unconscious? Pettus in her explanation of the term ‘colonial rationality’, refers to Said, who ‘pointed out in Orientalism, [the logic of colonialism] relies on the construction of an inferior Other’ (2018: 203). As researchers how much do we rely on the ‘racial Other’ in our arguments?
Centring femicide in her analysis of the ‘necropolitical’ wars in Mexico, Estevez uses the ‘racial Other’ to explain for the violence against women: political disenfranchised and unemployed Indigenous men are the cause of the rape, murder, and trade of women in Mexico. This somewhat pathological view of Indigenous poor men as unequivocally sexist and violent would seem to reify the representation of the Endriago subject. According to Estevez the racialisation and dehumanisation authorised by the War on Drugs motivates men to become hitman and gang members ‘and why as part of their human capital they use rape and femincide against women’ (2018: 109). What is missing in this analysis is any discussion of gender and sexuality. Who are considered men here and indeed who are being considered women? Estevez does not describe the type of women that are violated and killed, whether they are young or old, family to the men or strangers, Indigenous or of the Mexican citizenry; for example violence against trans women are not discussed in this chapter.
A particular danger with the concept of racialisation (of being turned into Other or non-being) is that race is understood as interchangeable and replaceable as the objects they subsume to represent. Shelly and Howell on post-apartheid South Africa takes the supposedly declining political relevance of racial signifiers as reflective of the resurgence of the drugs as an organising principle. Fransiska on Indonesia goes even further to posit drug users are the ‘new categories of people’ (2018: 181). This presupposes drug users are separate from racial groups and would seem counter to the aims of the book.
‘What binds us all’, Pettus claims, ‘metropolis and periphery alike – is what our separate identities have in common: the prospect of losing the biological foundations of our very lives and well-being on this planet’ (p. 208). Such an affirmation reduces community to the experience of violence predetermined on biology as the natural order of our relations to each other. Following Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí (1997), perhaps what we need to lose is the bio-logics that govern our lives if we want to commune together – the human and non-human. And then may ‘drugs’ not be conceived as outside the body but states of us.