Decolonising drug studies in an era of predatory accumulation

Abstract

The cultural and political-economic valences of psychoactive drugs in the Global South offer critical insights on local and international fault lines of social inequality and profiteering. Historically, in a classic primitive accumulation process the trafficking of industrially produced euphoric substances across the globe have wreaked havoc among vulnerable populations while extracting profit for the powerful. The complex flows of capital generated both by illegal addiction markets and also by the mobilisation of licit public funds to manage their mayhem, however, suggest the contemporary utility of the concept of ‘predatory accumulation’. The Enlightenment-era concept of ‘primitive accumulation’ usefully highlighted state violence and forcible dispossession in the consolidation of European capitalism. A contemporary reframing of these processes as predatory accumulation, however, highlights contradictory, nonlinear relationships between the artificially high profits of illegal drug sales, repressive governmentality and corporate greed. It sets these patterns of destructive profiteering in the context of our moment in history.

Keywords:

• Capitalism and centre–periphery
• narcotics trafficking
• primitive accumulation
• violence
• Puerto Rican diaspora
• colonialism

Notes

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4. Porter, Trust in Numbers?

5. Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Foucault, History of Sexuality.

6. Ghiabi, "Maintaining Disorder.”

7. Zigon, “An Ethics of Dwelling.”

8. Rodgers, “Drug Booms and Busts.”

9. Campos, "A Diplomatic Failure.”

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12. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 159–70.

13. Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise; Eber, Women & Alcohol; Courtwright, Forces of Habit.

14. Goodman and Lovejoy, Consuming Habits.

15. Marx, Capital, 872–942.

16. Bourdieu, Homo Academicus.

17. Bourgois, “Disciplining Addictions”; Messac et al., “Good-Enough Science-and-Politics.”

18. Bourgois, In Search of Respect.

19. Bourgois and Schonberg, Righteous Dopefiend.

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21. Bourgois, “Lumpen Abuse.”

22. Bourgois and Hart, “Pax Narcotica.”

23. Bourgois, “Insecurity, the War on Drugs.”

24. Ibid.

25. It is surprising that khat has not followed the profitable trajectories of poppies and coca leaves.

26. Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital.

27. US Department of State, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report.

28. Bourgois, “Insecurity, the War on Drugs.”

29. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODOC), Global Study on Homicide.

30. Bourgois, “Insecurity, the War on Drugs.”

31. Kaeble and Glaze, Correctional Populations in the United States.

32. American Civil Liberties Union, “Combating Mass Incarceration.”

33. Hansen and Bourgois, “Pathologizing Poverty.”

34. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor.

35. Reding, Methland.

36. Leung et al., “A 1980 Letter.”

37. Quinones, Dreamland.

38. Keefe, “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain.”

39. Ryan, Girion, and Glover, “More than 1 Million Oxycontin Pills.”

40. Reding, Methland.

41. Proctor, Golden Holocaust.

42. Novotny, “‘Ultimate Prize’ for Big Tobacco.”

43. Lopez, “Painkiller Companies.”

44. Case and Deaton, “Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century,” 63