Talking About the Flow: Drugs, Borders, and the Discourse of Drug Control

Talking About the Flow:Drugs, Borders, and the Discourse of Drug Control Paul Gootenberg (bio) This essay explores the relationships between illicit drug flows (my current area of historical research) and state borders. The larger theme, for objects-in-motion, is how statist languages of "control" underlie their construction and maintenance as illicit and criminalized flows. Students of drug trafficking can make public discourses about drugs a usefully explicit object of study. But in doing so they should also beware of the possible intellectual and political pitfalls of "talking like a state"—that is, of adopting the categories or characterizations of the illicit deployed by policing and regulatory agencies—for thinking well about such flows. Among other problems, it is hard for territorial states to supersede their stationary view of shifting, furtive, borderless activities, a dilemma of note in the recent "war on terrorism" as well. The essay winds its way to these ideas by addressing three topics: first, the relation of drugs to commodity studies writ large (how drugs were differentiated from other goods during the historic rise of commercial and industrial capitalism); second, the relation of drugs to the building of borders and states; and third, the role of bureaucratic-control language in marking and naturalizing the thin line between "controlled substances" and freer commodities. A critical definition: "drugs"—which are actually tricky to de fine—are psychoactive substances and commodities that, for a variety of reasons since 1900, have been construed as health or societal dangers by modern states, medical authorities, and regulatory cultures and are now globally prohibited in production, use, and sale.1 In commonsense and legal terms, we know exactly what they are—heroin, cocaine, marijuana, Ecstasy, quaaludes, methamphetamine, LSD , and so forth—but they are often difficult to disentangle from other legal and popular mind-altering commodities (such as coffee, [End Page 13] tea, alcohol, tobacco, kola nut) or valorized traditional ones (such as magic mushrooms, yage, kava, qat, coca leaf, peyote cactus) or legal and commercial scientific–medicinal drugs (ether, morphine, Demerol, steroids, Prozac, Viagra). There is no hard-and-fast alkaloidal or natural distinction between illicit drugs and other drug-like goods. Indeed, the "set and setting" of commodities in general (for example, the associations generated by advertising or by money power itself) may well induce mind-altering effects or addictive attractions in their consumers. Hence, the need to secure legal and discursive borders between illicit drugs and analogous commodities, pleasures, and medicines and the need for now-huge international bureaucracies (from the DEA to Interpol) devoted to the day-to-day dirty work of policing and fighting drug flows. The global trade in illicit drugs—worth about $300 to $500 billion in "street sales" annually—is among the world's largest commodity trades, everywhere in tandem with other flows and institutions, despite these massive efforts at control. Drugs Are/Are Not Like Other Global Commodities The economic forces driving cocaine's production and generating hostility towards it are no different today from what they were three centuries ago when the rising commerce in tea, coffee, sugar and tobacco linked Western Europe to its tropical colonies and revolutionized world consumption. —Sidney W. Mintz, "The Forefathers of Crack" Heroin is emerging as the ideal product for a global [narcotics] industry that is streamlining for the post 9/11 age—slashing payrolls, flattening hierarchies, marketing aggressively and keeping a low profile. —Matthew Brzezinski, "Re-engineering the Drug Business" A useful starting point is to simply consider drugs as just like "other commodities," and thus susceptible to the same approaches customarily used in interdisciplinary commodity studies. This is a good start because economic or structural perspectives help to cool down some of the passionate rhetoric (or state talk) that distorts much of the inner workings of modern drug flows. Thus, to take some working examples: the again-booming world heroin trade can be seen as comprised of shifting patterns of supply and [End Page 14] demand, profit-seeking and risk-taking entrepreneurs, rationalized labor and flexible-production schedules, extensive networks of middlemen and retailers, transport and outsourcing dilemmas, product testing and product substitution, all under crunching global competition. In this, drugs are the consummate...