Drug control, violence and capitalism in an international perspective: an analytical framework

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, many academic texts analysed the international dimensions of the security-drug nexus in the Americas. Their main focus is on the so-called ‘war on drugs’ carried out by the United States in the region since the 1970s. They seek to understand its international modes of violence and its political and social repercussions, especially for Latin-American countries. In this article, we suggest a complementary perspective that highlights the capitalist aspect of this global trend. Based on a literature review, this paper drafts an analytical framework grounded on a historical approach that draws attention to how factors and motivations related to capitalism interact with drug control and its respective violence. We highlight how this dynamic was driven by the interests of private and public actors within the United States, particularly pharmaceutical corporations. It argues that two factors underscore the importance of capitalism in the analysis of the security-drug nexus. The first is the process of drug commodification since the mid-19th century pari passu the professionalization of medicine and technological development. The second concerns the use of State police power to manage the illicit market resulting from the licit-illicit dichotomy stressed by the United Nations international drug control conventions. We conclude that such a perspective can reveal the intrinsic connection between the legal and illegal scope of drugs, which ends up analytically repositioning the relationship between public and private actors, as well as between the local and global scales.

KEYWORDS:

• International Drug Control
• violence
• capitalism
• militarization
• United States
• Latin-America

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Manuela Trindade, Jana Tabak, and Monica Herz for their support and useful feedback on earlier versions of this article, which was previously presented in the event “Everyday modalities of war: the circulation of security practices in local and global perspectives” in PUC-Rio, Brazil. And also would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. As does Courtwright (2001), I use drugs as a term that refers to a lengthy list of psychoactive substances, considered legal or illegal, mild or potent, used for medical purposes or not. All are sources of profit and all have the potential to become global commodities.

2. Marx uses this term to explain the first process of capital accumulation that allows the establishment of the bourgeois order under capitalism. This process, marked by violence, forced the separation of people from their means of subsistence, forcing them to sell their workforce to the new owners of the means of production (C.f. Neocleous 2014, 49).

3. For a detailed analysis of this conflict and its economic dimensions, see Brook, Wakabayashi (2000).

4. The case of Mexico is emblematic in this regard. For a statistical analysis of the relationship between the Mexican State’s military interventions to combat crime and drugs and the increase in violence against civilians, see Espinosa and Rubin (2015).

5. For an example of the use of this analytical framework, see Pereira (2000) and his analysis of the expansion of opioid consumption in the U.S. and its repercussions in the American continent.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) [432393/2016-1] and by the PUC-SP’s Research Incentive Plan (PIPEq) [11191].