Drugs
As with many things we have a strange relationship with drugs. We also have a hypocritical view, embracing some drugs and condemning others. Some groups are ok to take drugs, while others are not. We demonise drug dealers, forgetting that the west have historically been the biggest drug dealers. In the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century Britian fought China for the right to sell opium to its population. We have also, through colonialisation, forced many countries to become one crop economies, and then condemned them when this crop is drugs, or when we don’t like the dictator that is often a byproduct of having one crop economies (we are generally fine when they are on our side). The latest manifestation of this has been the ‘War on Drugs’ , which Dr Laura Garius, policy lead at drug reform campaign group Release. Describes thus “The war on drugs is, in reality, a war on people living in poverty and a war on people from black and brown communities,” she said, referring to policies instigated in the United States in the 1970s by President Richard Nixon’s administration. Ghiabi (2022) talks about how our current economic systems attitude to drugs s mystified.
“Mystification is the process by which drug wars are fought for peace and order, for development, while their reality is that of dismembering communities and fomenting the profits of capital, in the form of drug business (narco-capital) or its laundered investment in legitimate enterprises…By integrating the individual, subjective experiences of people living in drug wars, it is possible to undermine the mythologies and mystification of everyday capitalism” (p. 6-7).
Drugs policies have always been tied up with demonising and targeting certain ethic groups and the working class in general. The original Misuse of Drugs 1974 act talks about Opium and Marijuana, targeting the Chinese and Black population respectively. However, the outlawing of Cannabis in the 1930’s was tied up with big business. At the time a new process for producing hemp paper (a non toxic, easily renewable source) cheaply had been produced that looked to put the tree based paper companies (a toxic non-renewable process) out of business. A concerted effort was made to make cannabis illegal, with apocryphal racist scare stories of ‘drug crazed’ attacks of black men on white women.
Unreleased figures obtained by researchers at the London School of Economics (LSE) reveal that those in the highest socio-economic class — people like bankers, doctors, and lawyers — are three times more likely to be let off with a caution for drug offenses than the unemployed. And of the near 200,000 people stopped and searched for drug possession by London's Metropolitan Police last year, almost all of those punished — 93 percent — were working class.
Others talk about how the current economic system encourages drug use (we will talk about limbic capitalism in the alcohol section). Dislocation theory suggests that addiction epidemics, such as is happening in the states, are linked to the isolating forces of free market capitalism that creates a painful psychosocial dislocation of people from their communities that some address through addiction, and that this psychosocial dislocation is experienced more viscerally through economic deprivation.