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Abstract
Discussions of drugs in international political economy tend to focus on the relative advantages and disadvantages of particular regulatory regimes and governmental policy approaches. While the particular regulation(s) and social context(s) differ, the drug literature is in this sense repetitive and neglectful of significant features of the global drug economy. Drawing on social economics, we argue that the neglect of broad and holistic, synthetic, integrative and comparative drug research in IPE stems in part from a research program in which the state is “essentialized”, resulting in drug research that is too narrowly cast. Borrowing from social economics, poststructuralist Marxism, and new materialism, we develop an anti-essentialist approach for thinking about the global drug economy in an effort to reveal aspects of global drug production, distribution and consumption, and the power relations entailed therein, that are currently obscured.
JEL SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION:
Acknowledgments
Huge thanks to Lucy McGuffey, Chad Shomura, and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their comments and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose in regard to this research.
Notes
1 Karch (Citation2006, 24).
2 As Andreas notes, “Through its monopoly on the power to criminalize certain economic sectors, the state defines the boundaries of illegal market activities” (2004, 642).
3 To be clear, we do not mean to suggest that social stigmas surrounding drugs stem wholly from differences in legal treatment by states, but rather that they are overlapping issues, with increasingly prohibitive global drug regulation around the world in some cases reinforcing and legitimizing existing stigmas, and in others stigmatizing what was previously seen as a relatively socially benign activity (see, e.g., Frank and Nagel Citation2017; Lloyd Citation2012; Ventura et al. Citation2017 on the consequences of social stigmas surrounding drugs for users). For example, Carrier and Klantschnig (Citation2012) suggest that the export of the US War on Drugs to Africa in some cases created social stigmas where none existed before (see also Berridge and Edwards (1981) for a discussion of how restrictive legislation conspired with other factors to cast drug users as criminals).
4 There is some debate in the field about whether the term “cartel” represents an appropriate understanding of these organizations and how they work (e.g.Andreas Citation2004; Naylor Citation2002). Our use of it here is for the sake of efficiency only, as it best conveys our meaning to a broad audience.
5 “Diseases of civilization” or “Western diseases” refer to the various illnesses and ailments that disproportionately affect the populations of Western societies, and are typically thought to be rooted in changes in diet and lifestyle associated with the advent of agriculture, and then, later, the Industrial Revolution (e.g. heart disease, certain cancers, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity). See, e.g., Cordain et al. (2005).
6 As the reader likely already gathered, we are in debt to Marx and Engels (1848) and Shelley (1818) for this formulation.
7 Science and technology studies (STS) overlaps to some extent with our conversation here. A major difference between our perspective and commonly deployed STS frameworks is perspective and emphasis. STS studies on drugs, for example Hedgecoe and Martin (Citation2003), often focus on humanity and those human social practices that give form and meaning to “technology”. These authors note “the idea that the development of a new technology involves a range of heterogeneous social, technical, economic and political processes” (329). We certainly agree. That said, somewhat lost in this mix is “nature”. In other words, we view drugs here as interactions with nature, focusing on the life of non-human beings as they come into contact with humans in the industrial capitalist period. For us, drug technologies are relational artifacts, not only among humans, but between humans and other living and non-living “natural things”.
8 In 1917, after World War I, the government confiscated Merck & Co. and set it up as an independent company. The original German Merck is now known as Merck KGaA and has no affiliation with Merck & Co. ― known as Merck, Sharpe & Dohme outside the U.S. and Canada (Llamas 2018).
9 Former wheat geneticist Stan Cox (Citation2008) also makes some “chemical connections” between Big Food and Big Pharma.
10 A small piece of this question is reflected in the new literature on “pharmaceuticalization”, or “the process by which social, behavioral or bodily conditions are treated, or deemed to be in need of treatment/intervention, with pharmaceuticals by doctors, patients, or both” (Bell and Figert Citation2012). That said, pharmaceuticalization is only one of many dimensions of the issue we discuss above, i.e. the tendency to see health and wellbeing in industrial societies as a function of commodity consumption.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sasha Breger Bush
Sasha Breger Bush is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Colorado Denver. She teaches and researches about international political economy, global finance, global food and agricultural systems, and drugs.
Matthew Kriese
Matthew Kriese is working towards his BA in Political Science at the University of Colorado Denver, where he also works as a research assistant.