Chasing Dragons

The Flower: A Film With an Anti-Prohibition Message

I just caugh this over at boingboing.net and thought it was a clever way of presenting the follies of illict drug prohibition.

What do you think?

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 60

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Realer than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari' by Brian Massumi, available here.

• 'The Vienna Declaration' a demand for a full global policy reorientation with regards to illicit drugs, available to be read and signed here.

• 'India's Epic Head Count' by Meena Kadri at designobserver.com

• 'He-Man and the Masters of Transmedia' by Henry Jenkins at henryjenkins.org

• 'Foucault and Philosophy' by Clare O'Farrell at refractedinput

Happy Independence Day to all the American readers of this blog and a belated Happy Canada Day to all my fellow Canadians!

Photo credit: Lightmash

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 57

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Barcelona Rebels Against Tourist Invasion' by Giles Tremlett at guardian.co.uk

• 'The Art of War: Deleuze, Guattari, Debord, and the Israeli Defence Force' by Eyal Weizman at mutemagazine

• 'Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, and Arbitrary Killings: Special Report on Targeted Killings' by Philip Alston at the United Nations Human Rights Council

• 'Ten Things that Terrify Right-Wingers' by Joshua Holland at truthout.org

• 'Is NATO to Blame for Russia's Afghan Heroin Problem' by Simon Shuster at time.com

Have a good weekend!

Photo credit: bitzcelt

Why Jamaica Proves that the 'War on Drugs' is Not Over

Last week, Gil Kerlikowske, the top drug adviser to the Obama administration, claimed that the American government has ended its 'war on drugs'. Yet, as he made these comments in Ireland, a bloody battle was being waged on the streets of Tivoli Gardens in Kingston Jamaica.

Gunfights between the security services and residents, mass arrests, and reported extra-judicial executions were taking place in an ill-fated attempt at to capture Christopher 'Dudus' Coke, an alleged drug kingpin. The operation, initially resisted by the Jamaican cabinet, was eventually undertaken to fulfill the request made by the American government to extradite Coke to the United States to stand trial on an assortment of charges.   

As Maxine Williams has outlined in the Guardian, the political and legal situation in Jamaica is complex. To make sense of what has taken place, most media outlets have focused on Coke's close ties to the ruling Labour party, the absence of a government presence in these estates, and the desire of the Jamaican government to regain control of them. More critical observers, like Ben Bowling, have been quick to point to how American drug prohibition encourages the establishment of transnational drug cartels, endemic corruption, and levels of violence that are necessary to sustain this underground economy.

But there is another policy dimension to the US drug policy that allows one to understand what is taking place here and to see that the war on drugs is definitely not over. As I mentioned in a previous post, the war on drugs is deeply embedded into the institutional infrastructure of the United States. And one of the most effective mechanisms has been the Certification Process for Major Drug Producing and Transit Countries and accompanying Presidential certifications under Section 489 of the Foreign Assistance Act.

As I explained,

• These procedures are supposed to be used to monitor whether other nation-states have been complying with counter-narcotics obligations--or doing their best to meet them-- as laid out in the 1988 UN Drugs Convention. Foreign governments that are determined not to be meeting these obligations lose their eligibility for most forms of American economic and military assistance and an obligatory 'no' vote by the United States in six multilateral development banks. This entire process with the American government serving as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner and the potential sanctions it generates provide a form of political leverage that no administration will want to lose. And meeting the obligations of the UN Convention requires a vigorous law enforcement response to illicit drugs issues meaning that wars on drugs will continue elsewhere.

In the latest National Drug Control Strategy Report, Jamaica is listed as a major drug transit or drug producing country, though it was not given as dire an evaluation as Burma, Bolivia, or Venezuela. Thus, I suspect that political pressure exercised through this mechanism--as much as any desire by the  state to gain de facto control over areas like Tivoli Gardens--has also influenced the decision of the Jamaican government to conduct military operations against its own citizens at the request of a foreign state.

Currently, Jamaica is facing a budgetary crisis that has required the intervention of the IMF. It has been estimated that this coming fiscal year, nearly 62% of government spending will be used to service the national debt. American financial support through USAID Jamaica--as documented in the 2010-2014 USAID report-- is not a decisive factor enabling government spending overall but would be a key contributor to the security services budget at a time of cutbacks. Similarly, the recent Inter-American Development Bank plan to approve a $600 million loan to Jamaica is significant, as is the fact that the United States is the largest shareholder (30.1%) out of the 48 member states. An American no-vote based on Section 489 provisions might have put that loan in jeopardy, something of which the Jamaican government would have been acutely aware.

Jamaica then appears to be going through a process similar to that experienced by Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s. It was at this time when the United States resorted to a variety of incentives and coercive measures to get members of the Medellin and Cali cartels extradited to face charges in American courts. Extradition requests led to spectacular acts of violence and human rights violations on the part of cartels and the Colombian security services, greatly contributing to human insecurity experienced by ordinary Colombians. And in the end, successful arrests, extradictions, or eliminations of key underworld figures did nothing to stem to tide of cocaine entering the United States.

Four decades later, despite proving to be a failure as a tactic, the front-line of American counter-narcotics policy is still being exported--along with the associated costs in violence--through pressures enabled by extradition requests. The drug war and its coercive practices rage on in Jamaica, despite the claims of the Obama administration that its own rhetorical reference point has changed. 

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 55

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Surveillance Suspected as Spacecraft's Main Role' by William J. Broad at nytimes.com

• 'Killer Entertainments' by Jennifer Terry at vectorsjournal.org

• 'Obama's Missing Moral Narrative' by George Lakoff at truthout.org

• 'Bourgeois Property-based Rights and their Exclusions' at Lenin's Tomb

• 'And so Cameron's First Victims Are...' by Johann Hari at johannhari.com

• 'Jamaica Bleeds for Our "War on Drugs"' by Ben Bowling at guardian.co.uk

For those stateside or in the UK, enjoy the long / bank holiday weekend!

Photo credit: atomicshark

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 49

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• Malcolm Tucker--everyone's favourite fictional political consigliere from The Thick of It--has been providing election briefings over at guardian.co.uk

• Ethan Nadelmann's Testimony to Congress Hearings on the War on Drugs at the Transform Drug Policy Foundation's blog

• 'Lost Children of the Audit Revolution' by Stephen Logan at timeshighereducation.co.uk

• 'Human Terrain Systems and Military Intelligence' by John Stanton at counterpunch.org

• 'Amazing Rats' by Brian Mossop at thescientist.com

• 'The New Ecology of Information: How the Social Media Revolution Challenges the University' by David Campbell at the journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Have a good weekend!

Photo credit: kevindooley

'Rumour Has It...': Locating Mephedrone, Smart Drugs, Pharm Parties, and Jenkem in the Illicit Drugs Discourse

Recent weeks have been awash with media anxiety over a series of 'new' drug crazes sweeping across the United Kingdom. First it was reports that university students are commonly resorting to using 'smart drugs'-- mostly Ritalin and Modafinil--in order to give them an edge in preparing papers and revising for exams. Then it was the identification of a mephedrone use epidemic amongst UK youth, initially spurred by an erroneous report that over 180 students at a school had missed classes due to consumption of the substance. In the United States, recent years have seen the rise in reports of Pharm Parties-- social gatherings where teens allegedly swap random prescription medications--and the great Jenkem scare of 2007.

There are some common themes in the way that these stories are presented. First, in every case, all of the reporting is primarily based on rumour, unsubstantiated anecdotes, speculation,or inferential interpretation of tenuously related data.

Second, in most of these stories--save for Jenkem--what we see is in fact quite an old phenomena being dressed up as 'new'. For example, university students taking substances in order to raise their levels of alertness is not a recent development. Nor is the social practice of teenagers congregating together for the purposes of taking drugs. Similarly, that people ingest substances that give them a rush is not a 21st century phenomena devoid of historical precedent.

Third, hyperbole is the means by which these stories must be conveyed. It is not just an exaggeration of the events, effects or compositions of the substances, and who is using them that is required. Rather the emphasis must be on what these activities are said to represent: a loss of ethics, hedonistic degeneration, corrupted youth, and moral decay. The consequences are then said to be eschatological --or in case of Jenkem, perhaps scatological?--resulting in the destruction of an entire social structure and way of life.

Fourth, given the outrageous claims that are being made and that many of these claims are devoid of any corroborating evidence, they all turn to linking the threats to children. And all children are not equal in these stories. It is important that white middle class kids be identified as at risk because those are the children we are supposed to really care about.

Fifth, the linking of particular forms of drug use with children not only catalyzes the reactionary safety impulse of parents, it also locates the threat in a world (i.e., youth culture) that is familiar but still somewhat alien, making the claims seem much more plausible than they might otherwise.

Sixth, while children and youth are identified as the principle actors in these stories, they are granted no degree of agency towards the provision of their own well-being. Instead, children are framed as objects in need of protection. This framing is important because the assumed inability of youth to make reasoned decisions immediately precludes policy options--such as evidence-based drug education initiatives--in favour of panoptic surveillance and draconian criminal prohibitions that do very little to address the public health aspects of illicit drug use or to prevent the recurrence of recent tragedies.

Analytically, what is interesting is the work that is done by the substances themselves to make these stories appear plausible. What is it about prescription medications that makes the practice of artificial stimulation that much more dangerous or unethical than downing multiple cups of coffee, energy drinks, or over-the-counter sleep suppressants? Why is mephedrone that much more pernicious than extreme sports or marathon running where preventable injuries and deaths are quite common? 

There is also no acknowledgment of the social-medical context that may be contributing to contemporary youth drug consumption patterns. Given the increasing numbers of children who are being prescribed Ritalin and other drugs to make them more docile and compliant in under-funded classrooms (in 2005 over 23 million prescriptions   were filled in the US alone), not only are many of these drugs more widely available, but a culture of regularized drug taking for the purposes of altering mood has been established. But acknowledgment would uncomfortably shift the source of the problem away from reckless youth or foreign producers to parents, teachers, and doctors who have been complicit in the construction of a brave new world.

So what can be done? Charlie Brooker may have it right. Rather than focusing efforts on prohibiting drugs, perhaps its high time that we banned tabloid journalism? Or, in the very least, the people responsible for whipping up fear and outrage ought to be held to account.

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 45

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'A Carefully Crafted F**K You: Nathan Schneider Interviews Judith Butler' at guernica.com

• 'Robert Cox on World Orders, Historical Change, and The Purpose of Theory in International Relations' at theory-talks.org

• 'White House Shifts Away From "War on Drugs" Rhetoric' by Mike Lillis at washingtonindependent.com

• 'Visualising Africa: Moving Beyond "Postive Versus "Negative" Photographs' at david-campbell.org

And for anyone interested in the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (or MIME-Net), check out the Gametech 2010 conference site.

Photo credit: kevindooley

Chasing Dragons Reviewed in Canadian Journal of Sociology

My book, Chasing Dragons: Security, Identity, and Illicit Drugs in Canada (University of Toronto Press 2008) has just been reviewed in the Canadian Journal of Sociology. More important, I'm pleased to report that the review is supportive. Anyhow, you can read it  here.

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 34

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Cameron's plan to plunder the oeuvre of Simon Cowell' by Marina Hyde at guardian.co.uk

• 'Obama and Afghanistan: America's Drug Corrupted War' by Peter Dale Scott at globalresearch.ca (thanks to TransformDrugs for the link!)

• Canadian Prime Minister suspends Parliament in order to dodge investigations into a cover-up of Afghan prisoner torture and to fill Senate seats with patronage appointments unopposed at thestar.com

• 'How to Destroy the Book' by Cory Doctorow: Part I and Part II via thevarsity.ca

Have a good weekend and a happy new year!

Image credit: Temari 09