The drug dispositif : Ambivalent materiality and the addiction of the global drug prohibition regime

Abstract

International relations and critical security studies are increasingly including the role of materiality in the study of security practices, inquiring into how objects act as both threat and /or endangered referent. However, objects of ‘dual-use’ – that is, objects that are not only threatening or in need of protection but also beneficial or pleasurable to the human collective – figure less prominently. Drugs are such an ambivalent matter: beneficial in the context of medicine and at the same time threatening in the context of crime. Mobilizing the concept of the dispositif, this article questions how drugs and addiction materialize in the practices of the global drug prohibition regime. I argue that the ambivalence of the material object ‘drug’ is the condition of possibility of the regime. The regime as an epitome of the ‘drug dispositif’ illustrates how ambivalent objects give rise to expanding security practices and specific power relations, highlighting how (critical) security analyses could profit from greater awareness of ambivalent matters.

Keywords

critical security studies drugs international relations materiality prohibition regime

Introduction

In 1961, during the negotiations on the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotics Drugs, one representative declared that any global definition of drugs ‘should include provisions regarding substances which were not actually drugs but which could easily be converted into drugs’. Others outlined that ‘it was not possible to define chemical groups in sufficiently closed terms to include all synthetic drugs which might be suspected of addiction-producing properties’ and that ‘synthetic drugs’ are ‘hard to distinguish from harmless chemical substances’. Indeed, ‘there was an inevitable conflict between the need to protect human beings from the evils of narcotic substances and the advantages of their use in the fight against sickness and pain’.¹

Drugs have addiction-producing properties and therapeutic qualities; they destroy and cure; humans desire them for pleasure and need them to survive. Drugs are a deeply ambivalent matter; they are apparently continuously able to transform their aggregate state as they please, to form an endless number of combinations and derivatives.² It is this ambivalent materiality of drugs and its implications for the global governing of drugs in which the present article is interested. It focuses on the global drug prohibition regime, which essentially encompasses three UN conventions (1961, 1971, 1988) as well as a number of organizational entities involved in the functioning of the regime, such as the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Mobilizing Michel Foucault’s concept of the dispositif as a ‘constellation of institutions, practices and beliefs that create the conditions of possibility within a particular field’ (Salter, 2008: 248, emphasis added), I argue that the ambivalence of the material object ‘drug’ is the condition of possibility of the global drug prohibition regime. Without the ambivalent materiality of drugs, a constantly adapting and expanding regime would not be necessary and the regime’s practices would not need to constantly discipline the ambivalence of drugs. While critics might argue that every regime is dependent on its referent object, in the case of the drug prohibition regime it is not the mere ‘existence’ of the referent object but its tricky ambivalence – that is, the constant evolvement of ‘new’ drugs as well as their potential to be used not just in medicinal (licit) but also in criminal (illicit) contexts. To state my argument in brief: the drug regime itself is addicted to the ambivalence of drugs.

I continue to argue that, in this relationship between drugs and the regime, a number of specific power relations and security practices are at play. First, it is a relationship soaked in power, since drugs become materialized primarily through their capacity to disrupt the smooth functioning of members of society and society in general (see Aradau, 2010: 506), and only secondarily through their role in easing pain, and almost never (or only in negative phrasing) through their capacity to elicit pleasure. Second, the regime establishes specific power relations, in particular towards drug addicts; there is violence in what the regime does to those that use drugs (see Derrida, 1995: 236). Hence there are problematic consequences for the human beings targeted by the security practices of the regime. Ultimately, these power relations not only obscure and perpetuate dynamics of domination and oppression, they also reflect an excessive use and need of metrology. This is because continuous measuring allows for continuous control of drugs and their effects to deliver regular statistics of drug deaths, of seized drugs, or of numbers of acres of drugs eradicated (see Callon, 1998). While this need to control assists the regime, its signatory states, and the multinational pharmaceutical companies to erase ambivalence and differentiate the licit from the illicit drug, the ambivalence of drugs is at the same time beneficial to those profiting from their illicitness – for instance, drug cartels, drug growers, and so on.

It should be noted that the prohibition regime is only one fragment of the overall ‘drug dispositif’, as I refer to in this article. This dispositif encompasses a wide range of practices, institutions, and convictions – ranging from the regime’s practices of identifying substances to be controlled or crop eradication, to national regulations on consumption, practices of drug users, or ‘business’ practices of drug lords.³ However, as I will explain below, the global drug prohibition regime represents a nodal point with regard to the article’s interest. It is an epitome of the drug dispositif. For, in the regime’s practices, the ambivalence and materiality of drugs crystallize, and the regime is one – if not the – major place where the ambivalence of drugs is negotiated, where the need to govern and supervise drugs is cemented, and where accordant power relations are established. The regime’s treatment of drugs is thus a particularly pertinent place to trace how ambivalent material objects give rise to particular security practices. It is the place where different know-how on the term ‘drugs’ comes to converge (Bonditti, 2012: 103).

As will be explained below, through its use of the concepts of the dispositif and materiality to analyse a security issue, this article aims to fuel the debates in international relations and critical security studies on the role of materiality for (security) practices in general and it aims to address concrete ways of inquiring into the role of materiality for global politics in particular.⁴ While current writings have tackled how material objects like liquids, bodies, airports, computers, critical infrastructure, architecture, and so on act as both threat and/or endangered referent, this literature has focused above all on man-made objects that are, in most cases, objects of ‘single-use’. Janus-faced, ‘dual-use’ objects like drugs figure less prominently. Hence this article aims to contribute to this literature by exploring the role and intricacies of an ambivalent matter for security practices.

In the following section, I situate my argument in the context of the debates on materiality in international relations and critical security studies. This part also sketches my conceptualization of the drug dispositif and the role materiality plays therein. The third section outlines the overall ‘drug dispositif’ with a focus on central aspects and developments of the global drug prohibition regime.⁵ The fourth section analyses two main security practices of the regime to cope with the thing called ‘drugs’ and scrutinizes the ways in which human beings are involved in these practices. The material in the fourth and fifth sections primarily includes the UN convention texts (1961, 1971, 1988), the debates leading to these conventions, and contemporary material from the regime’s organizational entities (CND, UNODC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) (as the latter is involved in the process of deciding upon those substances to be subjected to global control).

Drugs, the dispositif, and (ambivalent) materiality

Even though drugs are an important vector of global security, they are still under-represented in international relations and security studies. Contemporary security analysis often clings to classical theories of international politics, shying away from regarding drugs and their global prohibition as socially constructed phenomena. Thus, the largest part of the existing literature on drugs remains firmly within a state-centric universe of rational, powerful actors, with only a minor part focusing on the relevance of norms or epistemic communities while still locating their effects in a state-centric world (see Nadelmann, 1990; Friman, 1996, 2009; Bewley-Taylor, 1999; Bewley-Taylor and Jelsma, 2012; Levine, 2003; Andreas and Nadelmann, 2006; Friesendorf, 2007; Howell, 2010). Writings from a critical security perspective are scarce (for exceptions, see Grayson, 2008; Herschinger, 2011, 2012; Crick, 2012) and – to my knowledge – there is no study from an international relations or security studies perspective analysing the global drug prohibition regime using the concept of the dispositif and focusing on the materiality of the thing called ‘drugs’.⁶ While critical security studies writings used the framework of the dispositif to address questions of security and/or materiality, Claudia Aradau (2010: 492) summarized that this literature ‘has been less interested in the role that objects played in the definition of the security dispositif’.⁷ Here lies the contribution of the present article, as it combines dispositif, materiality, and security practices in one analysis.

As simple observation shows, considering drugs as ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett, 2010: viii) that affects us involves a rejection of the idea that the world is divided ‘into two neatly opposed realms, a material order on the one hand and a separate sphere of meaning or culture on the other’ (Mitchell, 1990: 546).⁸ Rather than being a stable, inert entity, material objects are the result of dynamic processes of co-production between discourse and matter (Fraser and Valentine, 2008: 23; Keane, 2009: 450; Coole, 2013: 453–454; Dwyer and Moore, 2013; Aradau et al., 2014). While materiality in current ‘new materialisms’ (Connolly, 2013) circumscribes the matter out of which the world is composed (the substantial things, objects that make up our everyday existence, that operate in nature, in the human body, in human artefacts), discourse refers to the activity through which we establish meaning. Discourse ‘constitutes our social world and the structures that define it. It also constitutes the natural world by providing us with concepts that structure that world’ (Hekman, 2010: 1; see also Bennett, 2010: xvi; Coole and Frost, 2010a: 1). Thus, it refers to systems of meaningful practices that form the identities of subjects and objects, it includes the linguistic and the non-linguistic and it does not imply a rejection of the material world, but it is an affirmation of ‘the material character of every discursive structure’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 108, 111). Accordingly, the ‘process of materialization’ is ‘not about Being, but becoming’ (Coole, 2013: 453): materialization is thus shorthand for the interactive process in which matter comes meaningfully into being.

Most importantly, it is the aim of the present article to privilege neither materiality nor discourse. Accordingly, with regard to the discussions on ‘new materialisms’, this article strikes a balance by neither subscribing to Karen Barad’s (2003: 802) contention that ‘language has been granted too much power’ nor by tending to ignore the role of matter in (security) analyses (Bigo, 2002; Huysmans, 2006). Albeit in different ways, both stances risk reifying the separation of matter and discourse that this article wants to avoid. Arguing that the ambivalence of the material object drug is the condition of possibility of the global drug prohibition regime involves more than addressing the materiality of drugs. In other words, drugs come into being as beneficial in the medicinal context – as, for instance, in pain therapy – and as problematic in the contexts of drug use for recreation and/or profit, including addiction and crime. Yet, the ambivalence of drugs has an existential touch: we need drugs to survive, to heal, to get well. Accordingly, they are a matter within a conflicted political space. What drugs are, what separates the licit from the illicit use and the legal from the illegal substance are political decisions, since, for instance, ‘“illicit” signifies that a particular activity or thing is forbidden, though this prohibition may not necessarily be codified by law’ (Grayson, 2008: 3–4). Eventually, these political decisions dividing drug use into a medicinal (licit) and an illicit use lead to regulatory systems and institutional structures, and the regulatory system in the field of drugs is the global drug prohibition regime. Since the eve of the 20th century, states and international organizations as much as civil society and pharmaceutical companies have attempted to control the so-called illicit use (see McAllister, 2000: 2–4, 248). Yet, since 1961, when the first UN convention was agreed upon, the regime has continuously expanded its remit and a number of prohibitionist practices have emerged, ranging from policies for estimating a state’s annual amount of drugs for medicinal purposes, to crop eradication in drug-producing countries, to initiating strict policies on drug traffic and consumption at the national level. More specifically, the regime’s practices relate a material object like ‘methadone’, the factories within which methadone is produced, the statistics of drug deaths, the enormous profits from drug trade, pain-relief effects, hospitals, and addict treatment programmes all in one line. Hence, the regime encompasses a heterogeneous bundle of practices that are material and discursive. Consequently, to analyse the regime’s addiction to the ambivalent matter drugs, one needs a framework that does justice to discursive-material practices while embodying a critical sensibility (Aradau et al., 2014).

Michel Foucault’s concept of the dispositif is the way to assemble these threads in one coherent framework. It offers the conceptual and methodological space to articulate the heterogeneity of the drug regime’s discursive and material practices, inter alia relating regulations, bodies of addicts, and ‘scientific truths’ about drugs. The dispositif makes it possible to analyse the ‘multiple ways in which drugs are ascribed actions and how these actions (real or otherwise) generate governing responses’ (Moore, 2007: 59), because the dispositif is ‘the system of relations that can be established between [its constitutive] elements’ (Foucault, 1980: 194, emphasis added). Using the concept of the dispositif orients our attention to how these connections are made, since we are dealing with a heterogeneous ensemble – with changing lines of connection and separation, with transformative, self-reinventing forces – not distinguishing a separate domain of things from one of ideas. Instead, meaning arises out of the relations between elements in the ensemble, and the dispositif is a framework used to identify how the interconnections of seemingly unconnected elements establish relations of power (Deleuze, 1992: 159).

However, dispositifs are instable ensembles since the heterogeneous elements related in them are ‘subject to changes in direction … and to drifting’ (Deleuze, 1992: 159), and ‘neither absolute fixity nor absolute non-fixity is possible’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 111). Accordingly, power relations established within the dispositif are inherently instable; power effects produced by the dispositif change and the mobility of the elements is constantly calling for ‘re-adjustment … of the heterogeneous elements’ (Foucault, 1980: 195–196). As a consequence, ‘a dispositif is constituted by, and constitutive of, relations of power that reinforce its particular configuration of elements giving it durability’ (Aradau et al., 2014: 66). This ability of the dispositif to identify how interconnections of seemingly unconnected elements establish relations of power and the possibility of governance is ‘the trick of the dispositif’. It renders ‘the sum of all possible objects of governance as part of a continuum to be governed’ (Salter, 2008: 250). The particular constellation of discourses, institutions, practices, and beliefs created by the dispositif produces the conditions of possibility in a field like drugs and, thereby, creates the capacity for governance. The drug dispositif renders specific spaces governable on the basis of specific notions of norms, primarily the differentiation between illicit and licit drug use.

As I have outlined in the introduction, the present inquiry focuses on the drug prohibition regime as a cornerstone and point of crystallization within the overall drug dispositif. The regime’s practices are particularly instructive for the article’s interest in how the ambivalent materiality of drugs is negotiated, controlled, and erased; how a specific knowledge about drugs comes to converge in this aim for control and measurement; how the regime gives rise to particular security practices, and how power relations are established via these practices. Over the years, the regime has privileged a particular knowledge by writing the dominant meaning into the matter of drugs: ambivalent objects like drugs are objects of (in)security. Owing to their ambivalence, they challenge the aims of the regime’s practices to secure and protect. The resulting tendency is to consider ambivalent objects as dangerous first and foremost, hence postponing the acknowledgement of their other – in this case, medicinal – advantages as only the second step in line with the overall effort to exert control and securitize. The power relations of the regime thus aim at certainty to make it possible to classify, to distinguish between licit and illicit drugs and to base a great number of legal regulations on this classification. Overall, the materialization of drugs as objects of (in)security is vital for the prohibition regime’s existence and persistence – or, again and in short, the drug regime is addicted to the ambivalence of drugs.

Starting from the dispositif entails studying the fragile relations established between discursive and material elements and calls for a mode of inquiry that remains close to the concrete practices, as Foucault (1980: 194) stressed when pointing out that the dispositif is as much about the said as about the unsaid. As a material object within conflicted political space, drugs are surrounded by different practices that define them as a particular entity – that is, let drugs materialize within the practices of the drug dispositif (Pereira, 2010: 385). Practices, on the one hand, ‘embed meaning in things and bodily activities’; objects, on the other hand, ‘enable and constrain practice as it is enacted in and on the world’ (Pouliot, 2010: 299). Hence, focusing on practices that bring together humans and non-humans proves particularly apt for the present endeavour to trace how the ambivalent object drugs materializes in the practices of the global drug prohibition regime.

The ‘drug dispositif’ and the evolvement of the global drug prohibition regime

Today, drugs are illicit and their use is deviant behaviour. The only exception is the use of drugs for medicinal purposes. However, drugs have not always been construed as illegal. Historically speaking, contemporary acceptance of global drug prohibition is a rather recent development. Throughout history, individuals have always used drugs to satisfy their desire for pleasure, to self-medicate, to change their state of consciousness. Drug consumption played an important sociocultural role; they have been consumed throughout all societal strata. For instance, in the 19th century, entire families drank alcoholic beverages or used sprays containing constituents of the coca bush; women calmed their nerves with opiates; doctors or pharmacists used morphine meant for subscription (McAllister, 2000: 9–23). A number of important innovations made modern drug consumption possible. In 1805, morphine was isolated from opium and this was followed by the advent of hypodermic injection in 1843, the synthesis of cocaine from the coca bush (1855), and the synthesis of heroin from morphine after 1874. Yet, these highly welcomed innovations also raised levels of concern regarding the potentially damaging effects of drugs (Nadelmann, 1990: 504). Framed in theoretical terms, the years before 1900 were marked by a constellation of practices, institutions, and beliefs that allowed for the possibilities of broad societal drug use and a rather lenient stance on the latter.

It is argued that the United States played a crucial role in promoting international drug prohibition when, on the eve of the 20th century, the interpretation of drugs as illicit and their trade as a global problem gained ground. External and internal events led the USA to initiate the convening of an international opium commission in Shanghai (1909), which was followed by a number of international meetings.⁹ In 1961, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs opened up a new era of international drug prohibition owing to its universal frame and its requirement that states

Limit exclusively to medical and scientific purposes the production, manufacture, export, import, distribution of, trade in, use and possession of drugs, eradicate all unlicensed cultivation; suppress illicit manufacture and traffic; and cooperate with each other in achieving the aims of the convention. (Bewley-Taylor, 1999: 7)

The convention put under control not only several substances that are man-made, such as heroin or cocaine, but also raw products and their cultivation. As the remit of the Single Convention encompassed only natural drugs, the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances and the 1972 Conference to Consider Amendments to the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs extended the system to include synthetic drugs. Growing drug traffic prompted the adoption of the 1988 UN Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, which criminalizes acts such as illicit trading in precursor chemicals, international drug trafficking, and laundering of money and assets. By including the demand-side more cohesively, the 1988 convention tightened the system. Article 3(2) ‘amounts in fact to a penalization of personal consumption’ (United Nations, 1998: 80).¹⁰ UN involvement in the expansion of international drug control continued with the 1998 General Assembly Special Session on Drugs and the Beyond 2008 Forum.¹¹ Today, the acceptance of the UN drug prohibition regime is worldwide: currently, 184 states are parties to the 1961 Convention, 183 to the 1971 Convention, and 189 to the 1988 Convention (Levine, 2003: 145).¹²

This evolution bespeaks what Foucault outlined with regard to the dispositifs of security (Foucault, 2007: 20): we witness the coming into being of drugs as dangerous in a moment where relations of a heterogeneous set of events and elements (opium, technological innovation, disease) become reformed. These points of novelty mark the breakdown of the earlier dispositif (leniency on drug use) and the emergence of today’s drug dispositif: a dispositif forming a continuum of governable objects crystallizing in the prohibition of drugs (see Deleuze, 1992: 163–164). Furthermore, the 1961 agreement’s universalization of a specific interpretation of drugs as illicit and the consolidation of this interpretation with two further treaties highlights that the drug dispositif has since then been ravenously incorporating a growing number of elements and aspects of the material object ‘drugs’, such as drug consumption. Despite contemporary contestation of the regime’s supply-oriented approach, this interpretation of drugs as illicit and their use as deviant still stands.¹³ Today’s drug dispositif ‘concentrates its strength along its harder, more rigid, more solid lines’ (Deleuze, 1992: 164).

However, as the introductory quotes outlined, the regime constantly struggles with the materiality of drugs and the ensuing ambivalence. This gives rise to the present article’s interest in how drugs materialize in the regime’s practices. Elucidating the surroundings of the ambivalence of the thing called ‘drugs’ makes it possible to understand how drugs emerge out of material-discursive practices and how much the current global drug regime as part of the drug dispositif is normalizing (and obscuring) the regime’s power relations.

The regime’s practices and their dependency on a thing called ‘drugs’

While a number of prohibitive practices come into question, here I predominantly focus on the schedules of control¹⁴ that are the cornerstone of the global drug regime. As an inscription device (Latour, 1999), they are the site where the ambivalence of drugs is contextualized and attempts are made to tame it. While these schedules were established in the years 1961–88, they are regularly updated, predominantly by the CND upon request by a signatory state to the UN conventions, the WHO, or the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB). This updating procedure allows the schedules and ensuing practices to be considered not just as purely historical but also as contemporary, as it involves the application of the conventions as well as the workings of different organizational entities.¹⁵ To a considerable extent, these schedules limit the room for manoeuvre available to states as the latter are required to ensure that the mandatory control measures are applied in their national realm. One of the ensuing practices of the schedules is the provision of test kits by the UNODC, allowing rapid on-site identification of drugs and precursor chemicals.¹⁶ Via these tests, the materiality of drugs emerges and is discursively constructed as either illicit or licit. Finally, the schedules foreground the human body as the ‘container’ within which drugs have their dangerous, devastating effects (see United Nations, 1964: 103–114). This prompts a closer look at the regime’s practices on drug addiction. In sum, the corpus of the present analysis consists of the three treaty-texts, the official documentation of the debates on the conventions, and actual documents from the CND, UNODC and the WHO concerning scheduling questions, testing, or addiction.¹⁷ These texts have been analysed in order to elucidate ‘the law of what can be said’ (Foucault, 2004: 145) – that is, to distinguish the micro dynamics from ‘traces of a much broader ensemble [here: the drug dispositif]; traces that become a path to the non-discursive dimension’ (Bonditti, 2012: 103).

Schedules of control

According to the Single Convention of 1961, ‘drug means any of the substances in Schedules I and II, whether natural or synthetic’.¹⁸ These schedules – there are four in total – are long lists of incriminated substances, including well-known substances like morphine or coca leaves, but also preparations of drugs and precursor chemicals that can be transformed into a drug. Schedules I and II include substances that are liable to abuse, productive of ill-effects, or convertible into a drug. Schedule III comprises preparations that are, because of the substances they contain, not liable to abuse and cannot produce ill-effects and the drug therein is not readily recoverable. Finally, Schedule IV includes drugs that are already in Schedule I and are particularly liable to abuse or to produce ill-effects, and where such liability is not offset by substantial therapeutic advantages (Article 3 of the Single Convention). Schedule IV is the category of drugs, such as heroin, that are considered to have particularly dangerous properties.

This definition of drugs via schedules prompts a number of observations. First (and most obviously), the term ‘drug’ figures as an umbrella concept encompassing a variety of chemical agents, molecules, or substances that produce the effects one commonly associates with drugs. ‘“Drugs” is both a word and a concept’ (Derrida, 1995: 228); it supposes an institutional definition, a history, a culture of conventions, evaluations and norms. As a ‘handy stand-in’, the notion ‘drugs’ obscures – conceals – the materiality of the diverse substances enumerated by the schedules, while the ‘purpose of adopting the term is not just to provide a simple linguistic shorthand; rather, evoking the term “drugs”, despite its vagaries, effects a strategic technique of generalization’ (Moore, 2007: 72). This effect gives rise to security practices, in particular when drugs are constantly described as an ‘evil’ – as, for instance, in the preamble to the 1961 Single Convention or in the negotiations of 1971 and 1988 within which drugs materialize as a ‘social evil’ or are considered as ‘the common enemy’ (United Nations, 1973a: 20; 1991: 3).¹⁹ The term ‘drugs’ suspends the ambivalence of the various substances. Calling drugs ‘an evil’ frames the accordant security practices (that is, from the regulatory system of the regime to respective national regulations on drug-related offences and harm-reduction programmes) as a means to protect the non-using, ‘normal and healthy’ populations (see Walker, 2006), since it is sufficient to know that all drugs are evil – that is, dangerous. Hence, there is ‘no need to be troubled with burgeoning and often conflicting scientific evidence about harms, addictive potentials, or the behavioural effects of different substances’ (Moore, 2007: 75).

Second, the schedules describe in detail that the molecules and combinations of the various incriminated substances do not contradict the technique of generalization. Rather, they establish general categories like ‘IDS code’ (International Drug System code), ‘CAS No.’ (Chemical Abstract Service Number), ‘Narcotic Drug’, and ‘Chemical Name / Description’ to subsume any substance in a generalized fashion.²⁰ Eventually, this is how the regime aims to tame the ambivalence of drugs, to cope with their recalcitrance (Latour, 2000: 116). At the same time, this testifies to the regime’s addiction to the ambivalence of drugs, because the schedules are an ongoing attempt to pinpoint a vibrant matter – that is, a matter that constantly transforms as it is ‘impossible to predict future developments’ (United Nations, 1964: 19). The schedules struggle with the performativity of drugs, by which I mean not just the chemical transformations of substances and molecules. Rather, performativity implies that ‘humans and non-humans perform together to produce effects’ (Law and Singleton, 2000: 771) within the dispositif. By enumerating a substance under a specific heading like ‘methadone’ and then highlighting its materiality by displaying the molecules (in the case of ‘methadone’, it is ‘6-dimethylamino-4,4-diphenyl-3-heptanone’), the schedules pin down the materiality of the drug by establishing an explicit chain of molecules, singling out the unambiguous chemical properties of, in this case, ‘methadone’. They are giving the matter a clear profile; this is the way ‘methadone’ appears in the world and no other.²¹

Third, the schedules serve to expand the overall drug dispositif. In this regard, the schedules are security practices, as they draw clear lines between the various molecules and substances, listing the most dangerous ones in Schedule IV. These are the ones that are subject to the strictest control. ‘Dangerousness’ is decided upon in relation to the effects these substances have on humans (Article 2 of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs) – that is, the dangerousness of drugs is a performative effect of the interaction between humans and non-humans. In enumerating substances, these lists bring about the constitution of normally invisible molecules as distinctive objects: the molecules come into being as dangerous objects within the listing practices and the entire apparatus that prompts the listing (or delisting) of a substance.

Exemplarily, Article 2 of the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances and the manual Guidance on the WHO Review of Psychotropic Substances for International Control (WHO, 2010) outline the process for adding new drugs to the schedules. First, the WHO must find that the drug meets the specific criteria set forth in Article 2, Paragraph 4, and thus is eligible for control. Then, the WHO issues an assessment of the substance that includes the extent or likelihood of abuse (Article 2, Paragraph 4a), the degree of gravity in terms of public health and of utility of the substance in legitimate medical therapy and whether international control measures as provided in the treaty would be appropriate and useful (Article 2, Paragraph 4b). Within the WHO, the Expert Committee on Drug Dependence carries out medical and scientific evaluations of the abuse liability of dependence-producing drugs falling within the terms of the 1961 and 1971 agreements. As the WHO does not undertake pharmaceutical tests, a great variety of documents are analysed to decide upon the need of control in a preview and a critical review phase. On that basis, the expert committee makes recommendations to the UN CND on the control measures, if any, that it considers appropriate. The committee is composed of international experts, mostly pharmacologists, who provide the WHO with the latest scientific and technical advice on listing or delisting drugs.²² While this process of listing is, above all, a discursive practice, it clearly establishes relations between discursive and material elements. On the one hand, the listing practice embeds meaning into substances by evaluating them according to criteria like the degree of gravity in terms of public health and of utility in legitimate medical therapy. On the other hand, drugs as material objects enable and constrain these listing practices owing to their transformative abilities. As has been outlined above, it is this performativity that lets humans and non-humans perform together to produce the effect of, in this case, a listing or delisting of a substance, thereby expanding the dispositif.

Ultimately, the schedules are a place in the drug dispositif within which different know-how on the term ‘drugs’ comes to converge and within which the dominant meaning of drugs as dangerous is stabilized. Their dangerousness is a product of a co-constitutive relation between materiality and discourse; it is the product of neither alone. Through the suppression of the ambivalence of, say, ‘methadone’ in the schedules (being not only an illicit substance but also an analgesic), the drug emerges as a dangerous substance through an array of security discourses (i.e. on drugs and their countering), political economies of production and circulation, laboratories and scientific/pharmaceutical techne. The schedules bring to light the know-how humans have acquired about the respective substances and the constant need to keep the exuberant, dangerous wealth of the vibrant matter drugs at bay. They are the materialized understanding of drugs at a given moment in time and simultaneously testify to how drugs in their ambivalence-laden interaction with humans and the social world escape the control of humans (Pouliot, 2010: 298). The schedules are a strategy of using administrative and scientific knowledge to inscribe the meaning of drugs as dangerous into the material object in order to arrange the resources of states, pharmaceutical firms, and civil society representatives, as well as individual doctors and street workers. With the listing practices, the regime thus cuts deep into the fabric of societies, as the practice is not (merely) about eliminating the danger of drugs but also about extending the dispositif: governing, securitizing, and controlling the danger that is ‘drugs’ shapes the conditions of possibility not only of the regime and its actions but also of the drug dispositif as a whole. The concept of drugs is thus a ‘mot d’ordre’ (‘watchword’; Derrida, 1995: 229); it is not a mere description but carries its prohibitive purpose. It brings order into the apparent chaos of molecules; it organizes them, disciplines them by singling them out, categorizing them and differentiating substances from each other. In the light of my argument on the power relations established by the regime, it is here that we witness the power-related materialization of drugs within the regime. By inscribing specific circumscribed properties to drugs, qualifying them as dangerous and, thereby, trying to turn them into graspable, no longer ambivalent entities, the term ‘drugs’ erases the materiality of drugs as themselves generated and generative – that is, as being constituted by and producing other actors (Aradau, 2010: 506).

The UNODC test kits

Taming the ambivalence of the vibrant matter that is called ‘drugs’ becomes especially visible and tangible in the security practice of testing seized drugs (see Barry, 2005). The UNODC offers test kits to identify suspected material on site, providing law enforcement officers with ‘rapid and simple colour tests for the preliminary field identification of drugs and precursors most commonly encountered in the illicit traffic’.²³

The drug test kit identifies inter alia cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, and cannabis. The precursor test kit encompasses the most common compounds from which (via chemical reaction) drugs can be produced. These are inter alia ephedrine, potassium permanganate, or 1-Phenyl-2-propanone. A test kit consists of test tubes, pipettes, spot-plate, glass rod, and spatula. The kits offer further ‘instructions for use of the kits and flow charts … to assist in selecting the appropriate test on the basis of the nature of the suspected material’.²⁴ Most important, however, are the different reagents included in the kit: they cause colour shifts in the seized substance, giving information on whether one has discovered an illicit drug (or not). The procedure is indeed simple, as one only needs to put a couple of drops of the reagents on the suspected material. Within a few seconds, the ‘truth’ about the respective substance is revealed: licit or illicit. For instance, amphetamines in the ‘party drug’ ecstasy turn from white to dark blue/black; the amphetamines in the drug speed turn from white to orange, slowly growing brown.²⁵ Suspicion is key: even if no change in colour can be observed and the substance is most probably not the respective illicit drug, it still can be a different drug that cannot be identified with the applied reagents – that is, it still can be illicit (of course, it might also be completely licit or not contain any compounds that are listed within the schedules). The change in colour is a transformation that erases the ambivalence of drugs. White powdery substances could be anything, but the colour shift teaches us what kind of substance we have in front of us. And with the help of the test’s instruction, meaning is discursively embedded in the transformed substance, as the instructions explain that a specific colour change signals a prohibited drug. However, this is again an interaction between humans and non-humans, as it is the tested substance’s reaction to the reagent that enables the meaning as licit or illicit. The substance enacts the illicit drug it is meant to be.

In eliciting a singular ‘truth’ about a particular substance by subjecting it to a test, the test kit is a device to bring to light the know-how humans have acquired about the respective substances: you need to know roughly what kind of substance you have seized in order to choose the appropriate reagents. Accordingly, the UNODC kit assists law officers ‘in selecting the appropriate test on the basis of the nature of the suspected material’.²⁶ In the test kit, different knowledge about drugs comes to converge (about the seized substance, on how to test it, on how to read the test results, and on what to do with a positive result). Despite the fact that a test might provide inconclusive results, the test is about eliminating ambivalence with a technical device and feeds into the global drug prohibition regime’s aim to secure and protect: ambivalent objects are first and foremost dangerous. Within the tests, drugs materialize again as objects of (in)security, which stresses the addiction of the regime to the ambivalence of drugs.

As such, the test is an excellent example for the struggle with the performativity of drugs. It is not just a chemical reaction of the suspected material – that is, the shift in colour – it is a performance of humans (law officer/tester) and non-humans (substance) together that produces the effect of knowing that an illicit drug has been identified. By means of testing, the substance comes to embody this very knowledge (Barry, 2005: 58). This effect of the security practice of testing resides not only in calling the identified substance a dangerous, prohibited drug and, therefore, an object of (in)security, testing also gives rise to further security practices as it implies a range of implications for the humans who have been stopped with the substance or who are suspected to be its producer (e.g. arrest, conviction, imprisonment). In this way, the substances ‘become shaped by a social and economic [and security] dynamic which was external to them’ (Barry, 2005: 54). Hence, the tests are a particular way to keep ambivalence of drugs at bay and to control and securitize drugs. Through the identification of, for instance, a specific amphetamine as the ‘culprit’, as the part of ecstasy eliciting mind-altering effects, this amphetamine materializes as the dangerous substance that, on the whole, brings ecstasy into being as a dangerous object for humankind and societal health. And the latter points to what Catherine Carstairs (2006: 11) once remarked: ‘It is impossible to write about drugs without addressing the complex question of addiction.’ It is to this question that we now turn.

Drug addiction: The human body and the ambivalent materiality of drugs

A changing conceptualization of addiction and the addict emerges when we examine the debates leading to the three UN conventions. While in 1961 addiction had been considered as a vice of societal outsiders only, at the 1988 debates delegations considered addiction as a problem that could be encountered at any level of society regardless of profession, education, income, etc. (United Nations, 1964: 110; 1991: 6). Yet, constructing drug addicts as criminals whose ‘morbid habit’ ‘produces anti-social behavior’ (United Nations, 1964: 104, 60; 1991: 3, 9, 11) is more frequent than considering them as sick persons in ‘need of medical care’ and/or as ‘victims’ (United Nations, 1964: 106; 1991: 12; 1973b: 17; 1973a: 53).²⁷

To carve out how the body of the drug user materializes and how it is an easy prey to the ambivalence of drugs, it is worth focusing on ‘methadone’, a drug used in opioid substitution therapy. In a recent discussion paper, the UNODC (2011a: 2–3) divides opiates into two opposing categories:

Opioids are recognized to have a number of medical uses, including as analgesics for the treatment of mild, moderate and/or severe pain with, for example … methadone and morphine, to induce or supplement anaesthesia…, as cough suppressants …, and for the treatment of opioid dependence syndrome (buprenorphine and methadone)…. The reason that opioids are controlled under the international drug control Conventions is the harm associated with misuse and abuse.

We witness here the establishment of the difference between medicinal and illicit use of drugs, with the former being the good and proper use whereas the latter leads to (mis-)abuse. The quote suggests that only the medicinal use of methadone leads to beneficial effects (analgesia, cough suppression), while the abuse leads to harm. At a more general level, it is the human body that materializes here – or, to be precise, at minimum two ‘types’ of bodies: the addicted body and the healthy body, the using body and the non-using body, etc. Boundaries are drawn, creating particular materialities that matter more than others (Aradau, 2010: 500). Worse, bodies emerge that are less valuable in terms of what they are allowed to do, in terms of their abilities to fulfil their rights and obligations. While addicts are not the only users of drugs, their use matters more for the practices of the regime as it enables clear lines to be drawn between the good and the bad use. As the above quote suggests, separating the uses creates identities by opposing entities of Self (healthy populations, licit/medicinal use) and Other (addicted/sick body, illicit/dangerous misuse). Drawing boundaries in this way is obviously a security practice (see Campbell, 1998) as it is about eliminating ambivalence by considering drugs and users as dangerous, and thereby protecting a Self from the dangers stemming from the threatening Other.

As a synthetic opioid, methadone blurs these boundaries between types of consumers, between the different uses and contexts. On the one hand, it is listed as a prohibited substance in Schedule I since it has addictive qualities (see above). On the other hand, methadone is beneficial in drug-dependence treatment and as an analgesic, since it disposes of properties that ‘have the capacity to prevent the emergence of withdrawal symptoms and reduce craving. At the same time, they diminish the effects of heroin or other opioid drugs because they bind to opioid receptors in the brain’ (WHO/UNODC/UNAIDS, 2004: 12). Methadone is produced as a ‘paradoxical substance with a double identity’ (Keane, 2013); ‘it is not heroin and like heroin’ (Fraser and Valentine, 2008: 55). Ultimately, although this difference is not made explicit, the distinctions between use, drugs, and effects ‘are incorporated into identity categories in which the status of the “patient” and “addict” describes not only the circumstances and forms of drug use but designates types of persons’ (Keane, 2013; Bell and Salomon, 2009). This paradox of methadone has implications for the body of both addict and patient. For instance, individuals suspected of illicit drug use should undergo a medical screening involving blood and urine testing as well as other biological forms of screening (WHO, 2011: 22). If methadone can be applied, the patient’s body should, as the UNODC recommends, be subjected to supervised daily dosing to ensure the correct medication and the efficiency of the therapy (UNODC, 2011a: 33; 2011b).

In these discussions of the effects of methadone on the brain and of withdrawal symptoms, of screening and supervised daily dosing, the body of the ‘methadone client’ materializes as the one waiting for one’s dose in front of the respective clinic, moving docilely (or not) with others in line, taking the dose under supervision and being subjected to unexpected blood and urine testing (Fraser and Valentine, 2008: 107–112). Drug addicts/methadone patients are induced to ‘“subjectify” themselves by specific confessional techniques and ethical practices of the self’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982: 126–127; see also Howarth, 2000: 77).²⁸ The body materializes as disciplined, governed by the various procedures, and is simultaneously constituted through discourses on the threat of crime, surveillance, and precautionary measures. It is a patient’s body that should transform into a healthy body that is no longer a risk to the society in which he or she lives, since substitution therapy is said to reduce drug-related criminal behaviour (WHO/UNODC/UNAIDS, 2004: 19). Overall, substitution maintenance therapy is a security practice promoted by the regime to achieve a ‘drug free world’ (United Nations, 1991: 11, 13) since it is society as a whole that ‘benefits from substitution maintenance therapy through reductions in the incidence of criminal behaviour, reduced health and criminal justice system costs, reduced risks of transmission of HIV and other blood borne viruses, and increased productivity’ (WHO/UNODC/UNAIDS, 2004: 32).

In result, the body no longer belongs to the user (irrespective of whether he or she is an addict or a methadone client) – at least not as long as the addiction/consumption habits have been exorcized by the appropriate medical treatment. Eventually, by constructing drugs as objects of (in)security, the regime establishes specific power relations towards drug users. This is part of my argument as it accounts for the violence the regime puts upon those who use drugs (Derrida, 1995: 235–236). The regime’s language of body property, of possessing the user’s body, not only establishes ‘metaphorical walls’ around the body but also ‘seriously understates the sense in which we are embodied beings’ (Phillips, 2011: 728, 729). As long as the user is not in ‘possession’ of his or her body, the latter is an object of (in)security. All drug users – irrespective of whether they are addicts or clients – are painted ‘with the same brush, constituting a singular, governable subject who is inherently criminogenic’ (Moore, 2007: 90). Indeed, speaking of owning a body ‘normalises what remains a power relation’ (Phillips, 2011: 731) between the regime and the user. The addiction practices of the regime obscure the nature of this power relationship, of the regime being in the superior and the user in the inferior positions. This language of property is problematic, since it ‘can reduce our vigilance when new demands are put on us, limit our capacity for resistance, and convince us that nothing more can be done’ (Phillips, 2011: 732). This is the widest expansion of the drug dispositif: by inscribing the dominant meaning of drugs as dangerous onto the bodies of users, they are aligned to the continuum of governable subjects and objects produced by the dispositif.

Conclusion

In this article, I inquired into the role of the ambivalent object ‘drugs’ and how drugs materialize in the practices of the global drug prohibition regime. The ‘dual-use’ character of drugs – that is, being beneficial (in the context of medicine) and at the same time threatening (in the context of crime and addiction) – prompted me to argue that the ambivalence of the material object ‘drug’ is the condition of possibility of the global drug prohibition regime: without this ambivalence, no constantly adapting regime would be necessary. Owing to their ambivalence, drugs materialize primarily as dangerous. Thus, I continued to argue, two power relations inducing violence are at play. First, drugs come into being only through their capacity to disrupt the fabric of society and the life of humans (as in the schedules or the UNODC test kits). Their role in curing illnesses is beneficial, but also needs to be controlled (as in substitution maintenance therapy), and their capacity to elicit pleasure is beyond consideration. Second, there is violence involved in the practices on drug addiction. Not only does the body of the user materialize as a dangerous object owing to the intake of drugs, but also the deteriorated mind of the user is no longer in proper possession of his or her body – after all, the drugs have taken over. This language of body property within the drug dispositif reveals who is in charge of bringing the user back into normal life: the regime, the society of clean individuals. Hence – to give the argument of the regime’s addiction to the ambivalence of drugs a different twist – drugs are objects of security since they secure the life of the regime and, simultaneously, drugs are objects of insecurity since they threaten the life of those the regime is meant to protect.

The utility of mobilizing the dispositif for the analysis of the ambivalent object ‘drugs’ is obvious: it allowed us to scrutinize how a particular constellation of institutions, practices, and norms are deployed to discipline the ambivalence of the vibrant matter ‘drugs’ by considering them above all as dangerous objects. Furthermore it made it possible to adequately address the discursive-material practices without privileging materiality or discourse, as the regime’s practices relate discursive and material elements in one regulatory system. The dispositif’s ability to render all possible objects of governance into a continuum of governable objects has underscored the boundary-drawing practices that are created by naming molecules and substances ‘drugs’, and gives rise to specific power relations, exclusions, and forms of domination. What is crucial here is that the drug dispositif obscures these power relations as much as the dominant and violent dynamics flowing from these relations. They disappear in the efforts to govern and control the ambivalent object drugs. ‘([I]n)security is precisely about the manner in which the rearticulation of relations redraws the limits according to which the safe is to be included and the dangerous is to be excluded’ (Aradau et al., 2014: 78).

With drugs materializing predominantly in their destructive way and as objects of insecurity, their beneficial side is controlled and disciplined, and the notion of drugs as generative is erased. And, lastly, the body of the user materializes in purely instrumentalist terms: while normally a body is ‘being directed by an actor’s will in pursuit of his or her broader purposes’ (Diana Coole, quoted in Krause, 2011: 306 n. 26), drugs interfere with this actor’s will, because the regime stipulates that drugs are in possession of the user’s body. This reveals how ‘bodies as such function as sites of power, rather than merely being the instruments of the powerful’ (Diana Coole, quoted in Krause, 2011: 306 n. 27, emphasis in original). In sum, investigating the role of ambivalent matter in security practices brings greater awareness not only to how our being is entangled with vibrant matter but also to how we enact domination and oppression in discursive-material practices – in particular if the matter concerned is as ambivalent as drugs.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

While writing this article, I have benefited enormously from many illuminating conversations with Claudia Aradau, Martin Coward, Owen Thomas and Nadine Voelkner, members of the ‘Discourse and Materialities Method-Cluster’ of the International Collaboratory on Critical Methods in Security Studies (ICCM), and from discussions with all other ICCM members at the different workshops of the Collaboratory. Information on the ICCM can be found at . I would also like to thank Caroline Holmqvist and the attendees of the panel ‘Material Insecurities II: Securing Space and Place’ at the Millennium Annual Conference 2012 for their comments, the anonymous reviewers of Security Dialogue for their helpful comments, and Frank Sauer for his generous intellectual engagement and instructive remarks on earlier versions of this article.

Funding

Parts of this research have been generously supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Notes

Eva Herschinger is a lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen. She is the author of Constructing Global Enemies: Hegemony and Identity in International Discourses on Terrorism and Drug Prohibition (Routledge, 2011), co-editor of Diskursforschung in den Internationalen Beziehungen (Nomos, 2014), and author of articles in Millennium – Journal of International Studies, Terrorism and Political Violence, Cooperation and Conflict, European Political Science Review, and other journals.

References

Andreas

Nadelmann

(2006) Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Aradau

(2010) Security that matters: Critical infrastructure and objects of protection. Security Dialogue 41(5): 491–514.

Aradau

van Munster

(2007) Governing terrorism through risk: Taking precautions, (un)knowing the future. European Journal of International Relations 13(1): 89–115.

Aradau

Coward

Herschinger

Voelkner

(2014) The matter of method: Analysing discourses and materialities of (in)security. In: Aradau

Huysmans

Neal

Voelkner

(eds) Critical Security Methods: New Frameworks for Analysis. Abingdon: Routledge, 57–84.

Barad

(2003) Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 28(3): 801–831.

Barry

(2005) Pharmaceutical matters: The invention of informed materials. Theory, Culture & Society 22(1): 51–69.

Bell

Salomon

(2009) Pain, physical dependence and pseudoaddiction: Redefining addiction for ‘nice’ people? International Journal of Drug Policy 20(2): 170–178.

Bennett

(2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Washington, DC: Duke University Press Books.

Bewley-Taylor

(1999) The United States and International Drug Control, 1909–1997. London and New York: Pinter.

10.

Bewley-Taylor

(2012) International Drug Control: Consensus Fractured. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

11.

Bewley-Taylor

Jelsma

(2012) Regime change: Re-visiting the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. The International Journal on Drug Policy 23(1): 72–81.

12.

Bigo

(2002) Security and immigration: Toward a critique of the governmentality of unease. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 27(1): 63–92.

13.

Bonditti

(2004) From territorial space to networks: A Foucauldian approach to the implementation of biometry. Alternatives 29(4): 465–482.

14.

Bonditti

(2012) Act different, think dispositif. In: Salter

Mutlu

(eds) Research Methods in Critical Security Studies. Abingdon: Routledge, 101–104.

15.

Bourne

(2012) Guns don’t kill people, cyborgs do: A Latourian provocation for transformatory arms control and disarmament. Global Change, Peace and Security 24(1): 141–163.

16.

Bruun

Lynn

Rexed

(1975) The Gentlemen’s Club: International Control of Drugs and Alcohol. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

17.

Bull

(2008) Governing the Heroin Trade: From Treaties to Treatment. Aldershot: Ashgate.

18.

Callon

(1998) The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

19.

Campbell

(1998) Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, rev. edn. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

20.

Carstairs

(2006) Jailed for Possession: Illegal Drug Use, Regulation, and Power in Canada, 1920–1961. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

21.

Connolly

(2011) A World of Becoming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

22.

Connolly

(2013) The ‘new materialism’ and the fragility of things. Millennium – Journal of International Studies 41(3): 399–412.

23.

Coole

(2013) Agentic capacities and capacious historical materialism: Thinking with new materialisms in the political sciences. Millennium – Journal of International Studies 41(3): 451–469.

24.

Coole

Frost

(2010a) Introducing the new materialisms. In: Coole

Frost

(eds) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1–45.

25.

Coole

Frost

(eds) (2010b) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

26.

Coward

(2006) Against anthropocentrism: The destruction of the built environment as a distinct form of political violence. Review of International Studies 32(3): 419–437.

27.

Coward

(2009) Network-centric violence, critical infrastructure and the urbanization of security. Security Dialogue 40(4–5): 399–418.

28.

Crick

(2012) Drugs as an existential threat: An analysis of the international securitization of drugs. International Journal of Drug Policy 23(5): 407–414.

29.

Cudworth

Hobden

(2013) Complexity, ecologism, and posthuman politics. Review of International Studies 39(3): 643–664.

30.

Deleuze

(1992) What is a dispositif? In: Armstrong

(ed.) Michel Foucault, Philosopher: Essays Translated from the French and German. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 159–168.

31.

Derrida

(1995) The rhetoric of drugs. In: Derrida

(ed.) Points…: Interviews 1974–1994. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 228–254.

32.

Dillon

(2008) Underwriting security. Security Dialogue 39(2–3): 309–332.

33.

Dillon

Reid

(2009) The Liberal Way of Warfare: Killing To Make Life Live. London: Routledge.

34.

Dreyfus

Rabinow

(1982) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

35.

Duff

(2004) Drug use as a ‘practice of the self’: Is there any place for an ‘ethics of moderation’ in contemporary drug policy? International Journal of Drug Policy 15(5): 385–393.

36.

Duff

(2008) The pleasure in context. International Journal of Drug Policy 19(5): 384–392.

37.

Duff

(2013) The social life of drugs. International Journal of Drug Policy 24(3): 167–172.

38.

Dwyer

Moore

(2013) Enacting multiple methamphetamines: The ontological politics of public discourse and consumer accounts of a drug and its effects. International Journal of Drug Policy 24(3): 203–211.

39.

Fierke

(2013) Political Self Sacrifice: Agency, Body and Emotion in International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

40.

Foucault

(1979) The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: Introduction. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

41.

Foucault

(1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon.

42.

Foucault

(2004) Archeology of Knowledge. New York: Routledge.

43.

Foucault

(2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78. Translated by Burchill

. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

44.

Fraser

Valentine

(2008) Substance & Substitution: Methadone Subjects in Liberal Societies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

45.

Friesendorf

(2007) US Foreign Policy and the War on Drugs: Displacing the Cocaine and Heroin Industry. London: Routledge.

46.

Friman

(1996) NarcoDiplomacy: Exporting the US War on Drugs. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

47.

Friman

(2009) Crime and globalization. In: Friman

(ed.) Crime and the Global Political Economy. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1–19.

48.

Grayson

(2008) Chasing Dragons: Security, Identity, and Illicit Drugs in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

49.

Hekman

(2010) The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

50.

Herschinger

(2011) Constructing Global Enemies: Hegemony and Identity in International Discourses on Terrorism and Drug Prohibition. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

51.

Herschinger

(2012) ‘Hell is the Other’: Conceptualising hegemony and identity through discourse theory. Millennium – Journal of International Studies 41(1): 65–90.

52.

Howarth

(2000) Discourse. Buckingham, PA: Open University Press.

53.

Howell

(2010) Sovereignty, security, psychiatry: Liberation and the failure of mental health governance in Iraq. Security Dialogue 41(4): 347–367.

54.

Huysmans

(2006) The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU. Abingdon: Routledge.

55.

Keane

(2009) Foucault on methadone: Beyond biopower. International Journal of Drug Policy 20(5): 450–452.

56.

Keane

(2013) Categorising methadone: Addiction and analgesia. International Journal of Drug Policy 24(6): e18–e24.

57.

Keeley

(1990) Toward a Foucauldian analysis of international regimes. International Organization 44(1): 83–105.

58.

Krasner

(1982) Structural causes and regime consequences: Regimes as intervening variables. International Organization 32(2): 185–205.

59.

Krause

(2011) Bodies in action: Corporeal agency and democratic politics. Political Theory 39(3): 299–324.

60.

Laclau

Mouffe

(2001) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso.

61.

Latour

(1999) Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

62.

Latour

(2000) When things strike back: A possible contribution of ‘science studies’ to the social sciences. British Journal of Sociology 51(1): 107–123.

63.

Law

Singleton

(2000) Performing technology’s stories: On social constructivism, performance, and performativity. Technology and Culture 41(4): 765–775.

64.

Levine

(2003) Global drug prohibition: Its uses and crises. International Journal of Drug Policy 14(2): 145–153.

65.

Lundborg

Vaughan-Williams

(2011) Resilience, critical infrastructure and molecular security: The excess of ‘life’ in biopolitics. International Political Sociology 5(4): 367–383.

66.

McAllister

(2000) Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: An International History. London and New York: Routledge.

67.

Millennium: Journal of International Studies (2013) Special issue: Materialism and world politics. 41(3): 397–643.

68.

Mitchell

(2014) Only human? A worldly approach to security. Security Dialogue 45(1): 5–21.

69.

Mitchell

(1990) Everyday metaphors of power. Theory and Society 19(5): 545–577.

70.

Moore

(2007) Criminal Artefacts: Governing Drugs and Users. Vancouver: UBC Press.

71.

Musto

(1973) The American Disease: Origins of Narcotics Control. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

72.

Nadelmann

(1990) Global prohibition regimes: The evolution of norms in international society. International Organization 44(4): 479–526.

73.

Pereira

(2010) Becoming coca: A materiality approach to a commodity chain analysis of hoja de coca in Colombia. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 31(3): 384–400.

74.

Phillips

(2011) It’s my body and I’ll do what I like with it. Political Theory 39(6): 724–748.

75.

Pouliot

(2010) The materials of practice: Nuclear warheads, rhetorical commonplaces and committee meetings in Russian–Atlantic relations. Cooperation and Conflict 45(3): 294–311.

76.

Salter

(2008) Imagining numbers: Risk, quantification, and aviation security. Security Dialogue 39(2–3): 243–266.

77.

United Nations (1964) Official Records of United Nations Conference for the Adoption of a Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, New York, 1961 (24 January–25 March), Vol. I. New York: United Nations.

78.

United Nations (1973a) Official Records of United Nations Conference for the Adoption of a Protocol on Psychotropic Substances (Vienna, 11 January–19 February 1971), Vol. II. New York: United Nations.

79.

United Nations (1973b) Official Records of United Nations Conference To Consider Amendments to the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961 (Geneva, 6–24 March 1972), Vol. II. New York: United Nations.

80.

United Nations (1991) Official Records of United Nations Conference for the Adoption of a Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Vienna, 25 November–20 December 1988), Vol. II. New York: United Nations.

81.

United Nations (1998) Commentary on the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, Done at Vienna on 20 December 1988. New York: United Nations.

82.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) (2006) Recommended Methods for the Identification and Analysis of Amphetamine, Metaphetamine and Their Ring-Substituted Analogues in Seized Materials (Revised and Updated): Manual for Use by National Drug Testing Laboratories. New York: United Nations.

83.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) (2011a) Ensuring Availability of Controlled Medications for the Relief of Pain and Preventing Diversion and Abuse: Striking the Right Balance to Achieve the Optimal Public Health Outcome. New York: United Nations.

84.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) (2011b) The Non-Medical Use of Prescription Drugs: Policy Direction Issues. New York: United Nations.

85.

Walker

RBJ

(2006) On the protection of nature and the nature of protection. In: Huysmans

Dobson

Prokhovnik

(eds) The Politics of Protection: Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 189–203.

86.

World Health Organization (WHO) (2010) Guidance on the WHO Review of Psychotropic Substances for International Control. Geneva: United Nations.

87.

World Health Organization (WHO) (2011) Brief Intervention: The ASSIST-Linked Brief Intervention for Hazardous and Harmful Substance Use: Manual for Use in Primary Care. Geneva: United Nations.

88.

World Health Organization, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and UNAIDS (WHO/UNODC/UNAIDS) (2004) Position Paper: Substitution Maintenance Therapy in the Management of Opioid Dependence and HIV/AIDS Prevention. Geneva: United Nations.