Governing Human Life: (Bio)politics, Knowledge and Borders in Global Drug Policy 3031435516, 9783031435515

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Governing Human Life (Bio)politics, Knowledge and Borders in Global Drug Policy Ondrej Ditrych Constanza Sánchez Avilés

Governing Human Life

Ondrej Ditrych · Constanza Sánchez Avilés

Governing Human Life (Bio)politics, Knowledge and Borders in Global Drug Policy

Ondrej Ditrych Institute of International Relations Prague Prague, Czech Republic

Constanza Sánchez Avilés International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service Barcelona, Spain

ISBN 978-3-031-43551-5 ISBN 978-3-031-43552-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43552-2 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

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Introduction: A Case for a Critical Biopolitical Analysis of the Global Drug Control 1.1 A Biopolitical Reading of the Global Drug Control: Framework for Analysis 1.2 Drug Control as ‘Vital Politics’ 1.3 Structure of the Book 1.4 Conclusion References Drug Control Dispositif, State of Exception and Democracy 2.1 Democracy, Authoritarianism and Drug Control: Theoretical Remarks 2.2 The Bohemian Case: A Study of Nonequations 2.3 Conclusion References Which Knowledge Deserves to Be Named Knowledge: The Place for Science and Evidence in Drug Policy 3.1 Power and Knowledge in Drug Control: General Observations 3.2 Knowledge, Science and Power in the Context of Drug Control: The Paradox of Evidence-Based Drug Policy

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CONTENTS

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Knowledge, Science and Human Rights in the Context of Drug Control 3.4 The Role of Knowledge and Evidence in the International Scheduling of Substances 3.5 The ‘Cannabis Controversy’: International Rescheduling and the Challenges of Evidenced-Based Drug Policy 3.6 Conclusion References 4

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Migrants, Substances and Borders: The Case of the Spanish Southern Border 4.1 Drug Trafficking Dynamics in South Spain 4.2 Government Narratives and Policy Responses to Drug Trafficking in Southern Spain 4.3 The Securitisation of Drugs: The Neglect of Structural and Socioeconomic Factors 4.4 Narcoborder and Necropolitics of Drug Control: The Politics of the Alive, and of the Inert 4.5 Conclusion References Conclusion References

Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: A Case for a Critical Biopolitical Analysis of the Global Drug Control

Abstract This introductory chapter lays a theoretical groundwork for critical biopolitical analysis of the field that situates global drug control within the broader processes (Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2006) places under the rubric of ‘vital politics’. Having set the scene, it introduces the structure and content of the book. Keywords Biopolitics · Drug control · Governmentality · Vital politics · Drug policy reform · Dispositif

Controlled substances and their control effect the politics of human life and its ‘production’ in serious and undeniable ways. Yet, global drug policy has not been submitted to substantial and comprehensive analysis tracing the operation of the biopolitical mode of power—one that makes population a target with the objective of shaping life through mechanisms of control situated in the realm of calculation and the constitutive relations of power and knowledge (Foucault 1979, 2007).1 In this book, we seek to open the avenue to such analysis, and to provide some, by 1 A biopolitical perspective has been sparsely taken to interrogate issues related to drugs before indeed, as in Bourgois’s (2000) penetrating reading of the methadone clinic.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 O. Ditrych and C. Sánchez Avilés, Governing Human Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43552-2_1

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necessity selective and exploratory but theoretically informed, innovative insight on the currently vibrant global field of drug control. This introductory chapter lays a theoretical groundwork for critical biopolitical analysis of the field that situates global drug control within the broader processes Rose (2006) places under the rubric of ‘vital politics’. Having set the scene, it introduces the structure and content of the book.

1.1 A Biopolitical Reading of the Global Drug Control: Framework for Analysis Michel Foucault formulated no coherent theory of biopolitics. It is not our aim here to supply one. Yet there is a need for some stabilisation, however elusive, for the sake of analysis that follows and which takes biopolitics as a device—a powerful one, we believe—to capture something important in the way of modern government, and here in particular the government of certain assemblages of people, places and things organised around the (historically contingent and ever unstable) notion of ‘drug’. To this purpose, we start by conceiving biopolitics as a rationality that has as its aim the administration, sustaining and ordering of life and population (cf. Foucault 1976). The conduit of biopolitics is biopower as a new form of power that emerges in European modernity, exerting a positive influence on life while submitting living populations to control and regulation. While the notion of the state exercising this kind of control both by routine (public health policy) and exceptional means (pandemics management) may seem natural, Foucault’s historical explorations show this is not the case. Biopower emerges as a historical form complementing (rather than substituting) the earlier sovereign power—the repressive and negative, decisionist form of power over life and death; and disciplinary power that draws the boundaries between normality and abnormality by prescribing, enclosing, circumscribing and individualising.2 Biopower is, therefore, to be conceived relationally—rather than a substance or a property—, as a part of the multiplicity of relations of force that are immanent to a certain domain. In case of global drug control, one thus finds disciplinary strategies—for example, in relation to harm reduction and

2 Where sovereignty keeps prisoners in the dark dungeon, a disciplinary society ‘irradiates [them] with light and thus leaves them no possible retreat from visibility’ (Lambert 2013: 17).

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‘responsible use’ (cf. Fischer 2004)—and governmentality, as the management technique, a capillary, diffuse way of regularising forms of life of the population (Bigo 2002; Merlingen and Ostrauskaité 2006: 21), the exercise of power at distance by calculating and indirectly shaping the conduct of targeted individuals and populations (Foucault 2000; Dean 2010; Lemke 2011). In relation to the subject of this book, the ‘innovation’ is clearly visible in the shift from a society in which the use of mind-altering substances was managed through traditional means of social control to one in which the idea of controlling what people do with their own bodies (including drug use) is considered a matter of government and public policy intervention (for example, see Del Olmo 1985 and Buxton 2006). Yet the punitive rationality, sovereigntist in nature and sustained by certain forms of knowledge that form a distinct field of visibility as we explore later in the book, remains to play an important role in this domain too, coalescing with the other in new contingent combinations made possible by the more general resurgence of sovereignty reversing the heralded (neoliberal) retreat of the state (Strange 1996). Biopower operates through regulatory means, drawing on new technologies of measurement and calculation of people—and territory (cf. Elden 2013)—and new correlative relations of power and knowledge (Foucault 1979: 27) such as statistics, ‘the science of the state’. It induces positive effects, yet it certainly does not dispose of force but rather conceals the violent face of power.3 It is not enacted in separation, but in concrete, dynamic assemblages that affix together elements that can be associated with other forms—sovereign and disciplinary. This is indeed the case in the modern state as a ‘transactional reality’ (Foucault 2008: 297), a dynamic ensemble of relations that reinscribes sovereignty while colonising various other forms of power practices, condensing, but not monopolising power (cf. also Dean 2010). Such dynamic process of affixing heterogenous elements is at stake also with the drug control assemblage created by this state, which in turn forms part and parcel of global drug control. Affirming this becoming nature of power relations, untamed by pure forms, leads us to see biopolitics as a device analytically deployed not discretely, in separation, but rather in conjunction with other concepts from Foucault’s toolbox, including the (overarching) notion of dispositif .

3 Interview in Le Monde, 21 Feb. 1975.

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Foucault’s dispositif is a heterogenous ensemble of discourses, institutions, regulatory decisions, laws, architectural structures, administrative measures, scientific statements or philosophical and moral propositions. It is a ‘complex edifice’ that comprises components aligned with different modes of power and affixes them strategically in a large surface network (Foucault 1979, 1980, 2007; cf. also Agamben 2009; Deleuze 1992; Bussolini 2010).4 It is also a transient ensemble, a dynamic field ever in flux and prone to change. This change occurs not in epochal ruptures, but rather through contingent reconfigurations. At any particular moment, it can be conceived as a temporarily stabilised, regular pattern of practice, governed by a general line of force linking together its multiple elements formed and operating in distinct appareils (machines) of production, generating subjectivities and their capacities and interests (and limiting them). These elements, the identities of which are not intrinsically related to the dispositif—which merely arranges them—retain the possibility of constant redistribution, reinscription and redeployment (cf. Raffnsøe et al. 2016). Dispositif is a concrete configuration in time and space that arranges these elements—which can belong to several dispositifs at once—, and also a heuristic device to interrogate a certain field of forces. In that sense, it is, as Mitchell Dean notes (2017), a figure of immanence that negates a ‘monotheist dream of power’ and looks beyond institutions to the overall technology by which power is exercised. As such, it makes it possible to understand how something heterogeneous holds together without ceasing to be heterogeneous (Allen 2011), and temporarily structures the dynamic field of power in a way that prescribes but does not completely determine social outcomes (Raffnsøe et al. 2016). This field has to be visualised and made intelligible for the purpose of government. In Gilles Deleuze’s development of the concept in particular, dispositif thus has an important visibility function—it distributes the visible and the invisible according to its particular regime of light (Deleuze 1992). Dispositif is a concrete arrangement, but also an analytical tool; a heuristic device that allows us to make claims about a concrete field of power (cf. Bussolini 2010). In International Relations literature, it has 4 Agamben (2009) traces the genesis of dispositif to dispositio as a Latin translation of o„κoνoμ´ια in early Christian theological writings. Pasquinelli (2015) proposes that Foucault’sparticular understanding of dispositif was inspired by Georges Canguilhem’s thought about the normal and abnormal.

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been mobilised as such to interrogate multiplicities of force organised around risk (Aradau and van Munster 2008), insurance (Lobo-Guerrero 2007), catastrophe (Aradau and van Munster 2011), or terrorism (Ditrych 2014). Indeed, Eva Herschinger (2015) previously deployed it to interrogate the very subject matter of our book—drug control. Herschinger’s key argument is that it is the ambivalence of the drug as a material object that is the condition of possibility of the drug control regime—seized with disciplining this ambivalence that promotes expansion of security practices and establishes particular power relations to defend society and act on ‘the addict’—as a part of the broader drug prohibition dispositif. For Herschinger, dispositif as a device enables to interrogate the particular constellation of institutions, practices and norms used to discipline the ambivalence; and to attend to both discursive and material practices without privileging neither (Herschinger 2015: 195). In this book, we look at the global drug control through the lenses of dispositif that allows us to explore its heterogenous yet (transiently) coherent nature and ‘subject effects’ on targeted individuals and populations. We do so by interrogating not primarily the international drug control regime practices – as we have done previously (Sanchéz Avilés and Ditrych 2018, 2020)—but other distinct facets of this broader dispositif and the operations of power located there, at different scales, in the process of relevant knowledge formation correlative to the field of power, or in the (narco)borderscapes. To that end, we also mobilise a broader set of devices from the Foucauldian toolbox to that end—and not just Foucauldian. Endorsing the ‘becoming’ nature of power relations allows us to invite to the argument voices critical to the original postulates about biopolitics—notably Achille Mbembe and his polemical concept of necropolitics and necropower as the modern, institutionalised version of the decisionist sovereign power—‘the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’ (Mbembe 2003: 11)—enacted in (post-) imperial peripheries. Necropower is a contemporary figure of sovereignty that manifests in the drug dispositif in these peripheries that can, we propose, coincide with (narco)borderscapes—and that need not be distant from the metropoleis, as is indeed the case of Campo di Gibraltar to which we attend in detail.5

5 For the discussion of biopolitics and necropolitics in the migration domain, to which our case also relates, see Estevez (2018).

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The history of drug control (cf. McAllister 2000; Buxton 2008) is intimately related to the emergence of the modern power assemblages that integrate biopolitical power along other formations—including necropower—in the nation state and upscale it, first through the imperial, and later international organisation grid for governing the global. Narcotic substances have been among the first goods to travel globally in the modern period. Not only have they played a major role in making the habits marking European capitalism classes, or have been inserted in the capitalist relations of production generating docile labourers’ bodies—and being proscribed when they had contrary effects. The traffic has been inextricably related to the very emergence of modern global capitalism and imperialism, producing numerous dependencies, related global flows—including forced human traffic—and cultural shifts (cf. Gootenberg 2009). To this day, it rides on the wave of neoliberalism and the market civilisation (Gill 1995) pushing for unimpeded circulation and limited state interventions (‘small states’). We will return to the issue of redefining the prohibited sentences along the neoliberal lines as taxable products, allowing circulation of certain substances and even creating regulated markets for them bolstering the state—while also threatening ‘corporate capture’ (Title 2022; Reis Pereira 2022)—later in the book. Here, suffice it to say that the culturally produced difference, between legal and illegal substances (which is actually a rather recent norm) meant those on the former side provided tax income that contributed to anchoring the modern, territorial nation states rather than undermining them (Gootenberg 2009: 17). Indeed, critics have pointed out to the problems inherent in upscaling biopolitics (or governmentality) into global spaces from within the boundaries of the state (Selby 2007; Joseph 2010; Chandler 2009). The perspective of this book however purposefully interrogates power practices irrespective of domain and scale. The studies of biopower and governmentality tend to assume a standpoint which deliberately explores power beyond the state (Rose and Miller 1992). There is no plausible argument for a priori casting aside the global level of analysis (Larner and Walters 2004; cf. also Dillon and Reid 2001) that, in our understanding, incorporates and collapses other scales. The categories of political scale are just as accidental as units in the science of metrology—even as, just as these units, they have been very much naturalised, including through the anarchy problematique that governmentality invites us to circumvent. Not only should this naturalisation not be inadvertently reproduced in critical

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research, for example by pointing that Foucault sought a ‘regicide’ and therefore it is flawed to transpose his ideas to the realm of international. It should, insofar as it reinforces existing patterns of domination, be actively resisted. In our previous research of drug control, we traced the operations of power—compulsory, institutional, structural and productive (Barnett and Duvall 2005)—in the international drug control regime (Sanchéz Avilés and Ditrych 2018, 2020). We showed how the growing international influence of the U.S. in combination with strong structural factors related to the securitisation of drugs as threatening the capitalist economy was fundamental to the regime’s emergence (for alternative perspectives, see Buxton et al. 2020; Daniels et al. 2021; Koram 2022). The dense web of institutional rules and practices has then ensured discipline, limiting the possibility of deviation and resistance against the regime’s prohibitionist and punitive rationality in combination with a powerful moralising discourse foregrounding the ‘evil’ nature of drugs, and ongoing securitisation practices reinforcing the decisionist, punitive drug control paradigm. The international drug control practices however have not only been deployed on individuals and populations with preformed subjectivities, but have participated in their production— separating the healthy from the (dangerous) addicts and the (docile) patients/clients —, and the production of the spaces in which they live and roam, from the heterotopias of hospitals and laboratories where different rule of distribution apply, to the marginalised (narco)borderscapes where deviances are concentrated and which can be far removed from the political and economic centres or, as we discuss later in the book, can be internal peripheries. We provided a thick description of institutions and processes of the international drug control regime; and also the critical reading of the regime, drawing attention to the fundamental difference in the meaning of ‘drug’ as the materiality around which the regime’s practices are built, the biopolitical effects of those practices, and the political technologies (such as numbers, as inscription devices that enable modern government by means of standardised inscription of events and processes to control calculable targets of intervention. In this book, we expand on the perspective we introduce earlier that renders drug control an element of the global biopolitical mode of production (cf. Hardt and Negri 2000)—producing and administering ‘health and welfare of the humankind’, in the words of the Convention on Psychotropic Substances (1971), through processes that traverse

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different scales from global to local. The regime, disciplining and disciplined by the prohibitionist rationality and the (laborious) maintenance of the cultural distinction between good / bad substances—whether natural or chemical—contributes to the preservation of the healthy body that is at once individual and collective (‘body politic’), and which is free of disease and corruption in both physical and metaphysical sense—and so can be enrolled in the neoliberal market civilisation. In so doing, the regime enables the policing role (which is also a biopolitical role) assigned to the state which fights—and is ever on the verge of losing, and so needs to be reinforced—the battle to contain the illicit flows that in real terms multiply the market value of the ‘drug’ hundreds of times while involving desperate humans on both ends of the commodity chain (Gootenberg 2009) while undermining the state’s function to provide for, including in pastoral terms, the individual and the society. These flows are rendered particularly insidious because they enter and corrode the domain of the state where it guarantees the individual rationality as the condition of its very existence, by capillary means. They remain very much alive, the containing (sovereigntist) effort—to keep the externalised threat of uncontrolled alterity (defined in terms of race, social class, gender or nationality) on the outside—of the state notwithstanding. But they also vitalise the state, by legitimising its apparatus’ agency for policing, pastoralisation and also social purification constant to prevent the destabilisation of the social order caused by the capillary invasion of drugs that cause the rational individual to lose (self-)control. In our earlier analysis, we provided a story of the emergence of the drug control dispositif as the production and circulation control apparatus which later evolved to include a biopolitical rationality with a focus on individual rehabilitation and the cohesion of the body politics as well as dissemination of knowledge (‘understanding’) for prevention of societal pathologies. In the following chapters, we focus on more micropolitical investigations of those elements of the global drug control dispositif that enable collapsing superficial differences of the modes of power—which coalesce, combine and recombine in the dispositif that also repacks and repurposes elements from other, coexising dispositifs of power (such as the general surveillance apparatus mobilising inert things to observe flows rendered visible by movements of other inert things such as ‘narcoboats’)—; scales (and so escaping the ‘territorial trap’ and the corresponding methodological nationalism); and even the punitive/ permissive binary inscribed in the drug control discourse.

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Drawing inspiration from governmentality studies (cf. Rose 2006; Merlingen 2011), to interrogate these elements, we propose to break down the overarching notion of dispositif into several component parts deployed throughout the book. There is an overall strategy, a line of force that orients the various elements, which in the case of drug control dispositif is the government of life. There are basic rationalities of government —ensuring health of the individual and body politic and optimising their productive functions in support of the status quo social order. There are general problematisations , identifying that which is in need of correction, transformation and improvement, and programmes that outline how reform to reach the desired state is to be achieved. The general rationalities of government are reflected in locally devised and deployed political rationalities . Detectable through the study of often mundane and seemingly commonplace technical and bureaucratic practice but also the operation of violent exceptional politics, political rationalities are specific forms of thought that make the social reality (that is to be acted on) intelligible through continent schematisations, on the basis of which they produce regulative ideals and reformatory plans. To put these reformatory plans into practice, finally, political technologies are used, as assemblies acting on individual subjects, populations and spaces. Before introducing the elements of the dispositif to which we attend in the following chapters, we wish to finally propose that when illuminated from the critical biopolitical perspective, the global drug control dispositif can be usefully rendered as a part of a broader field of ‘vital politics’ that currently provides it with a considerable dynamics. Such framing of the evolution of the drug control dispositif expands the depth of the biopolitical analysis in current conditions. It also allows us to contemplate the prospective evolution of the drug control dispositif, to which we attend specifically in the conclusion.

1.2

Drug Control as ‘Vital Politics’

The genealogy of the global drug control can be traced to the biopolitical concern with the health of the population and the corresponding social control that the modern state developed and which was progressively upgraded to the global level. In the twentieth century, the concern with health of the population was combined, at terrible human cost, with concerns about the biological constitution of the population—and

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displacement or eradication of the pathological elements deemed threatening to its future flourishing. This concern was not exhausted in a technologically enhanced mass murder. It had also a welfarist form, in which citizens were made responsible for taking care of their own bodies. Nikolas Rose suggests, however that the vital politics of the twenty-first century will consist of something else. It will be concerned with ‘our growing capacities to control, manage, engineer, reshape, and modulate the very vital capacities of human beings as living creatures’ (2006: 3). The advancing knowledge and technology humankind discovers expands the possibility of intervention into human life—producing it as an emergent form. It is premised, Rose proposes, on a molecular vision of life which allows for microscopic yet extensive engineering interventions. The human body is visualised on the molecular level, endowing elements of life with new mobility using specific ‘tools’ to cut, bind, or copy genes (Rose 2006: 14). The second key rationality in the present vital politics is optimisation. The objective is no longer returning to a normal state (‘health’), eradicating abnormality, but rather to alter, and enhance this normality through new forms of pastoral power—similarly, in fact, to conventional illicit substance use, but by reconfiguring the vital processes without the stigmatisation associated with conventional ‘drugs’. The concomitant processes, Rose continues, produce new subjectifications as health became one of central values in the life of modern societies in the Global North, patients have turned into consumers, medical knowledge has become democratised—yet, as we argue later on, without erasing a certain hierarchy of evidences—and, on the foundations of the molecular form of life, humans develop a new ‘somatic subjectivity’ that foregrounds the corporeal existence and experiences and acts on oneself within (in part) the discursive order of biomedicine (2006: 26). All this generates new economies of vitality in which biopolitics and bioeconomics have increasingly coalesced, enabled by new technomedicinal potential to see, visualise and calculate (e.g. insurance). What does such vital politics do to the drug control regime—ever dysfunctional, but repeatedly supplied with a new lease of life by state apparatuses—, and what does it suggest about its future? We return to this issue in the conclusion of this book, but several preliminary points suggest themselves already. First, vital politics animates the perpetual destabilisation of painstakingly established yet ever precarious boundaries of normality and abnormality when it comes to drug use. At present, as in the past but in new, ever moving constellations of power, what

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counts as normal enhancements is derived from the ‘biovalue’ that can be extracted from the vital properties by the (now biotech) capital—so that, for example, to ship experimental enhancement drugs from the Global North to Africa and reporting back result, that is, back-trafficking ‘knowledge’ used to generate profit at home does not qualify as drug traffic since it increases the shareholder value of the sprawling biotechnological industry (Rose 2006: 32). What remains is the resistance towards the drug as a means to emancipate the individual—and the collectivities inhabiting the various modernscapes that feature in drug commodity chains—from the wheels of modern neoliberal apparatus to the reach of the state apparatus that polices it. Needless to say, from the hegemonic perspective this is a pathological form of emancipation, as the ‘desirable’ one concerns, in the conditions of neoliberal society, above all the self-improvement of the corporeal existence. Second, as citizenship becomes increasingly biological, the citizens— living and performing a new somatic subjectivity in the world where their molecular life becomes intelligible and open to new forms of interventions advancing individual and collective desire—bear a new responsibility for the conduct vis-à-vis their somatic selves and cultivation of life. Third, this new responsibilisation notwithstanding, the state has no intention to exit the stage, instead continuing to engage in ‘fantasies of control’ of the transnational drug flows (Gootenberg 2009) but also enacting new forms of authoritative intervention on the vital existence of the population, both in the exceptional conditions such as the covid pandemic, and more routinely—including in the domain of drug control. These interventions take place against the background of the politics of nature that produces controversies and normative contestation around life processes (genetics, abortions). For today’s vital politics, ‘natural’ is no longer the exclusive frame of reference since the aim is alterity rather than stasis. However, in the broader social field politics and nature are hardly dissociated. It is not only the conservatives who thematise the decay of the ‘natural’ order of things and its constitutive building blocks (family, nation) that is threatened by progressives’ interventions. Where reactionary critics of globalisation naturalise politics, as Pavel Barša (2021) notes, the enlightened progressives politicise the nature by displacing the anthropocentric perspective on life and foregrounding the nonhuman estates of our environment. The globalisation of the use of psychoactive plants, traditionally used in native contexts for centuries, and now spread throughout the

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world (such as ayahuasca, psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline cacti or— although differently—coca leaf) is a good example of the latter. The fact that it is not just the ‘molecule’ the use of which has been globalised, but rather of the plant itself and the ritual surrounding it, has been raising awareness of the origin, and sensitivity relationship between the use of traditional psychoactive plants, the context from which they originate, and the knowledge constructed around them (Bouso and Sánchez-Avilés 2020).

1.3

Structure of the Book

The following critical analysis of biopolitics of drug control informed by the concepts and debates introduced in this chapter is divided into three parts. In Chapter 2, we attend to the relationship of drug control, democracy and authoritarianism, but also, more broadly, general modes of government linked to ‘resurgent sovereignty’ and ‘mutant neoliberalism’ macrostructural pressures that coalesce and together inform the biopolitical effects of drug policy. We trace this relationship by means of a micropolitical investigation of the evolution of drug control in the Czech Republic since the country’s transition to democracy. While such investigation confirms the link between liberal government and (more) liberal drug control, it also shows nonlinearity of the liberalisation process as a result of the sovereigntist and neoliberal pressures that have been countered, by and large, by technocratic actors. The role of these technocratic actors using ‘evidence-based’ approaches to challenge punitive rationality inscribed in the dominant drug control policies—and reinforced by the advent of resurgent sovereignty—makes the Czech case extraordinary. Indeed, as we explore in detail in the following Chapter 3, ‘evidence-based’ approaches tend to be more often used to sustain rather than challenge coercive and punitive drug control policies, claiming the authority of ‘science’ yet failing to conform to them. We start this exploration by surveying the relationship of power and knowledge in the drug control dispositif in general terms—zooming onto the (in)visibility effect of knowledge establishing certain ‘regimes of light’ which condition (reformatory) political action—, and then surveying existing hierarchies of knowledge that produce privileged knowledge formations and marginalise traditional and forms of knowledge, together with, e.g. social science as sources of valid empirical claims that could inform public policy. As in the previous chapter, here too we engage

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in a micropolitical investigation—this time of a controversy related to (re-)scheduling of cannabis in the international drug control regime. While exemplifying the constitutive relationship of power (constellation of forces) and knowledge (which contributes to reproduction of this constellation), it also shows that the drug control dispositif is ever becoming through controversies that challenge established boundaries of speakable—and hence doable. The biopolitical effects of these boundaries on the lives of individuals and communities are substantial. Chapter 4 looks in detail at how the global drug control dispositif shapes those lives on one of Europe’s (internal) periphery—the Spanish Southern border. To interrogate the related processes, we mobilise the notion of (narco-)borderscape and explore how security practices and the broader cultural production of this heterotopia of political order, but also effects of the conventional liberal dispositif seized with the control over circulation of (inert) things manifest biopolitically here—with zones of exception like Campo di Gibraltar becoming sites for the exercise of necropower to protect the (national) body politic against the ‘poison’ spreading through capillary means. This micropolitical investigation evidences how social root causes shaping the illicit drug trade (and social policies designed to eliminate local marginalisation) are occluded by the resurgent sovereignty that produces securitised and militarised approach of drug control that produces meagre success even on its own terms. Deconstructing the link between drugs and security, we argue here, is the first but essential step in fomulating a more competent and compassionate drug policy. Finally, in Conclusion, following this miniseries of diagnostical interventions, we turn to the strategies that may limit the biopolitical effects of resurgent sovereignty and mutant neoliberalism in drug control. We outline three in particular. First, we suggest reproblematisation (foregrounding welfare over security) and experiment to innovate drug policies. Second, we propose to turn the deviation and insurgency practices in the international drug control regime into a systemic reform, effecting a ‘regime change’. Last but not least, we move to conceiving foresight as a critical strategy for biopolitical analysis that can be incorporated in the broader field of ‘critical drug knowledge’.

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1.4

Conclusion

What is the purpose of critical (micro)investigations of the global drug control dispositif conducted along these lines? Indeed, power thought in Foucault’s terms is immanent in social relations. It cannot be escaped, and books—on their own—will not change the world, as Foucault himself noted (Wade 1978). Effective critique however opens new political possibilities, ‘le nouvel imaginaire politique’ (Foucault 1994) for reconfiguration and alternative subjectifications. Power relations are neither good nor bad, but rather dangerous because of the constant possibility that they turn into a solid form of domination (Foucault 1997)—which, rather than power as such, can and should be resisted. To illuminate elements of the operation of the drug control dispositif and its far reaching (bio-)political effects conducted here is done to maintain, and perhaps even expand the space for thinking political alternatives, in particular in the face of potentially dramatic transformations related to vital politics ahead, not limiting our field of vision to seeing (and thinking) like a state (Gootenberg 2009; Scott 1998). This is the aim we set out with on this exploratory journey.

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Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France: 1977–1978. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics. London: Palgrave. Gill, Stephen. 1995. Globalisation, Market Civilisation, and Disciplinary Neoliberalism. Millenium 24 (3): 399–423. Gootenberg. Paul. 2009. Talking About the Flow: Drugs, Borders, and the Discourse of Drug Control. Cultural Critique 71: 13–46. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Herschinger, Eva. 2015. The Drug Dispositif: Ambivalent Materiality and the Addiction of the Global Drug Prohibition Regime. Security Dialogue 46 (2): 183–201. Joseph, Jonathan. 2010. Governmentality of What? Populations, States and International Organisations. In Foucault and International Relations: New Critical Engagements, eds. Nicholas Kiersey and Doug Stokes. London: Routledge. Koram, Kojo. 2022. The Legalization of Cannabis and the Questions of Reparations. Journal of International Economic Law 25 (2): 294–311. Lambert, Léopold. (ed.). 2013. Foucault: The Funambulist Pamphlets. New York: Punctum Books. Larner, Wendy, and William Walters, eds. 2004. Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces, 2004. Routledge: London. Lemke, Thomas. 2011. Foucault, Governmentality and Critique, 2011. London: Paradigm. Lobo-Guerrero, Luis. 2007. Biopolitics of Specialized Risk: An Analysis of Kidnap and Ransom Insurance. Security Dialogue 38 (3): 315–334. Mbembe, Archille. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. McAllister, William. 2000. Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge. Merlingen, Michael. 2011. From Governance to Governmentality in CSDP: Towards a Foucauldian Research Agenda. Journal of Common Marke Studies 49 (1): 149–169. Merlingen, Michael and Rasa Ostrauskaité. 2006. European Union Peacebuidling and Policing: Governance and the European Security and Defence Policy. London: Routledge. Olmo, Del, and Rosa. 1985. La socio-política de las drogas. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela. Pasquinelli, Matteo. 2015. What an Apparatus is Not. On the Archaeology of the Norm in Foucault, Canguilhem, and Goldstein. Parrhesia 22: 79–89. Raffnsøe, Sverre, Marius Gudmand-Høyer, and Morten S. Thaning. 2016. Foucault’s Dispositive: The Perspicacity of Dispositive Analytics in Organizational Research. Organization 23 (2): 272–298.

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CHAPTER 2

Drug Control Dispositif, State of Exception and Democracy

Abstract This chapter explores how the general rationalities and technologies of contemporary government inform the drug control dispositif. It argues that while differences between democracies and authoritarian regimes may indeed be theoretically postulated, contemporary drug control is now also linked to certain more general modes of government and faces shared macrostructural pressures of resurgent sovereignty coalescing with neoliberal governmentality across the regime type continuum. This argument is an alternative to linking drug policy either to regime type, ‘degree of government’ or positioning of a state in global economy. It is advanced in detail in a case study of the Czech Republic’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy, tracing the parallel—nonlinear—evolutions in the country’s drug policy. Keywords Czech Republic · Democracy · Authoritarianism · Resurgent sovereignty · Neoliberalism · Drug policy reform · Civil society

Drug policy has traditionally been left out of the standard democratic debates and evaluation processes to which many other public policies are routinely subjected. The security paradigm underlining the approach to drug control means that ‘state of exception’ has been the rule. This has been the case in both democratic and authoritarian regimes. In the latter, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 O. Ditrych and C. Sánchez Avilés, Governing Human Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43552-2_2

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people who use drugs are more likely to be deprived of their rights and more frequent human rights violations are committed in the name of drug control. That said, drug policy designs betray similarities across regime types—a point increasingly highlighted by civil society movements (Sarosi 2018) and even debated in side events at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (Science for Democracy 2019). This chapter explores how the general rationalities and technologies of contemporary government inform the drug control dispositif. The commonplace punitive drug policy may be ineffective, or even downright counterproductive in terms of meeting its stated objectives—i.e. to remove the ‘drug problem’ produced through the very practices and within the cognitive frames of the drug control dispositif itself, based on the officially sanctioned expertise that defines a certain field of visibility (see next chapter). While demand and market size constantly increase, rather than decrease globally over time, the irony of resurgent sovereignty is that by perpetuating the punitive rationality it keeps the locus of actual control over production and traffic beyond reach with the organised crime which collects the profits, and so empowers transnational organised crime entities to weaken state institutions (Tinasti 2020). However, despite this failure drug policy has manifest biopolitical effects, creating a space and potential for social control in the conditions where state of exception and governmentality meet—at what ultimately turns out to be a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism (cf. Agamben 2005). While we believe that exploring in a comparative manner the relationship between the form of government (democratic, authoritarian) and drug control warrants more attention, we also point out that contemporary drug control is linked to certain more general modes of government and faces shared macrostructural pressures of resurgent sovereignty coalescing with neoliberal governmentality—not necessarily across the board, but across the regime type continuum. We advance this argument in detail in the case study of the Czech Republic’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy, tracing the parallel evolutions in the country’s drug policy.

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2.1 Democracy, Authoritarianism and Drug Control: Theoretical Remarks Biopolitics concerns the control and regulation of living populations. In the drug control dispositif, it combines with disciplinary practices—including in the field of knowledge, establishing certain hierarchies of evidence (see Chapter 3)—and the resurgent spectre of sovereignty. It does so in the heterotopias of the global order, like the (narco)borderscapes to which we attend to in Chapter 4. It is the walls and fences of the world today, Wendy Brown (2010) suggests, that embody the states’ desire to restore their vanishing sovereignty, the capacity to keep out the outside in response to global forces unleashed by nothing else than the same vanishing sovereignty—most of the walls in today’s world are found at the economic and social faultlines of global neoliberal governmentality, separating the globalisation’s net losers and beneficiaries defending their privilege (Rosière & Jones 2012). In that respect, walls substitute the earlier desire of the ‘age of sovereignty’ to settle territorial divisions that were unclear and contested. They can also be considered one of the most fundamental attributes of state sovereignty since fences and boundaries have been symbols of property, genealogically closely related to sovereignty through extension of Roman private law to the political domain in late Middle Ages (Holland 2010). The resurgent sovereignty manifests in some particularly ignominious ways—irrespective of the regime type. It does so not only in these heterotopias, but also in a more diffused manner, in the space delineated by modern governmentality. It may be safely assumed that the punitive rationality at the heart of the drug control dispositif is not effective in terms of precisely what it seeks to achieve—to control drugs. It is, however, effective in achieving many other political objectives spun around preservation of the (geo)political status quo, which often have little or nothing to do with them. The ‘war on drugs’ performed this function at the closing of the Cold War, integrating elements of the construction of the Communist threat but also terrorism (in the form of ‘narcoterrorism’). As such, it may be seen as a security discourse in its own right; but also one that bridged the ‘red scare’ with the later hegemonic discourse of terrorism underlying the Global War on Terror (cf. Jackson 2005; Herschinger 2011; Ditrych 2014). It is important to recognise here that while countries of the Global North have been charged with imposing a certain hegemonic rationality of drug control on the rest of the world—and there is evidence to that

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end—punitive prohibitionism and the criminalisation of drugs have been very functional policies for the elites of the Global South (as much as the Global North) as well in terms of social (even political) control over certain, often vulnerable populations defined by race, ethnicity or gender. The dividing line thus lies not only between the Global North and the Global South. Many populations in the latter suffer the consequences of repressive drug policies—yet the political, economic and social elites also benefit from them. The case of Colombia illustrates how the alliance between elites, illegal armed groups and drug traffickers to appropriate land—a process that intensified in the 1980s—resulted in a large increase in socioeconomic inequality, which pushed many peasant and indigenous communities to cultivate illicit crops (Walsh 2022: 18). These communities were simultaneously targeted by armed actors as part of a strategy that blurred the boundaries between counterinsurgency and the fight against drug trafficking (Pereira et al. 2022) and suffered the impact of aerial crop fumigation with glyphosate (Cruz et al. 2020). Similarly, many vulnerable populations in the Global North have been suffering the consequences of the ‘war on drugs’ which dramatically increased stigmatisation and discrimination against historically marginalised groups (Rolles et al. 2012: 11–12; Stryker 2019). The prohibitionist rationality is sustained, despite controversies (e.g. instigated by harm reduction paradigm), by a set of reproductive securitisation practices in the drug control in which the production, trade and use of certain substances and in certain situations is deemed not just a public policy, but a security issue—and against which, and the corollary pathological phenomena such as transnational crime—society must be protected by exceptional means (Borda 2002; Fukumi 2008; Crick 2012). The securitisation effects militarisation of international drug control, or more severe penalties in national criminal codes (Uprimny et al. 2012). It also feeds the forceful operation of decisionist sovereignty of the state whose apparatus situates the drug problem in the realm of (permanent) emergency. It would be misleading to attribute these practices to authoritarian regimes only; but also, to erase any dividing line between the forms of government that constitutionally guarantee individual freedoms, and those that suppress it in the name of abstract ‘collective will’ enacted by despotic elite classes. In principle, one can assume that in illiberal regimes, policies are rarely designed in transparent and inclusive ways and so are less likely to be sustainable and in public interest (Sarosi 2018). Tinasti

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(2020) moreover proposes and evidences, albeit in an episodic manner, that the prohibitive rationality inscribed in drug control allows criminal organisation to weaken state institutions in particular in the ‘neopatrimonial’ conditions of production and transit countries. Illicit economies based on drug production and trafficking provide resources for political regimes that are, as a result, less likely to become more capable of governing, and more democratic. Indeed, crises spurred by violence and organised crime activities related to drugs seem to adversely impact efforts to deepen democracy where democratic institutions are not deeply rooted (Hiskey et al. 2020). Neither is democracy—whether in the Global South or Global North—served by charismatic authoritarian leaders who use ‘drug wars’ to construct and assert their populist personas, divert attention from policy failures or simply play out on societies’ deeper anxieties, insecurities and desires by pledging to be ‘tough on crime’, stigmatising minority populations in the process (Tinasti 2020). However, while Raikes (2022) shows that industrialised democracies that are majoritarian in nature tend to have more punitive rather than rehabilitative drug policies, a systematic, comparative empirical research aligning regime type to drug policies is yet to be conducted. Here, we are not to close this lacuna but rather propose that drug control may be conditioned more on generalisable tendencies of government divorced from regime type (democracy, or authoritarianism) that are constituted, above all, by a generalisable state of exception and neoliberal pressures; and then to confront this proposition with the empirical case of the Czech Republic transitioning from authoritarianism to democracy, showing—in an innovative matter—the nonlinearities and nonequalities in the processes of regime transition and drug policy (re-)design. This approach forms an alternative both to the attempts to link drug policy features with regime type, but also degree of government —which Samuel Huntington provocatively called the ‘most important political distinction among countries’ (1968: 1), or the given state’s placement in the narcotic international division of labour (Bartilow and Eom 2009) and the world economy more broadly (Wallerstein 1984).1

1 Regarding the degree of government, the ‘balloon effect’ marking shifts in drug production where institutions are weak has been documented, together with the further weakening effects of the organised criminal activity related to drugs, and even emergence of hybrid political orders engaging in alternative provisions of public goods.

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Following Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben (2005) has argued that the permanent state of exception is the dominant paradigm of contemporary politics. The turning of a provisional and exceptional measure such as a wartime ‘state of siege’ into a general technology of government has clear biopolitical significance. The thesis may be excessive, carried by a train of (hyper-)events such as the Global War on Terror—or more recently, in Agamben’s own case, the covid pandemic. Yet it clearly relates to the domain of drug control which has as its objective of protecting society or, to use the language of drug control conventions, ‘welfare of humanity’. The state of exception can have a territorialised form—as in the (narco)borderscapes discussed in Chapter 4, but also other peripheral spaces of modern globalised life. To give an example, Fischer (2004) explore supervised injection sites as spaces of exclusion in the modern city as a consumption space, products of desire for social control, surveillance and risk management—although these spaces have also been argued to be islands of resistance for people who use drugs and deal with all kinds of violence, with reference, e.g. to Metzineres in the Raval neighbourhood of Barcelona (Shirley-Beavan et al. 2020), or in Lisbon and Vancouver (Canêdo 2022). However, the state of exception need not be contained to such spaces, operating instead, as Judith Butler (2004) suggested, in the broad field of governmentality. While, as Foucault had argued, appropriation of governmental functions by the state (‘governmentalisation’) allowed the state to survive in the past, the governmentality field now provides the condition of possibility for the re-emergence of the re-animated anachronism of resurgent sovereignty. That is to say that sovereignty (direct and punitive) and governmentality (‘conduct of conduct’) combine rather than exclude one another as modalities for the exercise of power, and the former no longer operates as a source and symbol of political power. It is rather administered in a diffusion manner outside law (which in the governmentality field is established as a tactic) not directly by the sovereign, but rather by large bureaucracies featuring a number of ‘petty sovereigns’ (ibid.). This is how a state is performed— and often at the cost of individual human rights and civil liberties. In the ‘zone of indistinction’ (Agamben 2005) created by the generalised state of exception as a political technology, democracy and authoritarianism do not truly dissolve as distinctive types. Their differences do become much less clear cut, however. The resurgence of sovereignty is further sustained by a particular modification in one of the most typical governmental technologies—risk

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management. Cladia Aradau and Rens Van Munster (2007) document this change in the case of global (counter)terrorism dispositif. After the 9/11, calculation and profiling, which were the traditional technologies in the insurance domain, have been extended to the realm of security, establishing a paradigm of algorithmic governance (Amoore and De Goede 2005)—and warfare—here. This has been paralleled by an innovation in the risk management technology—the introduction of the element of precaution. Precautionary risk management is based on the notion that the prospect of future catastrophe—‘not if, but when’ causing serious harm—must be avoided at all costs, leading to hypersecuritisation legitimising excess in security practice. This is where risk management as an actuarial technology through which biopower is enacted turns to security; and, by extension, also necropolitics. This process can be traced in the realm of drug control too—where, as in the (counter-)terrorism dispositif, it impacts on rights and liberties of people abroad through the militarised practice of ‘war on drugs’ as foreign policy (notably in the case of the U.S.), but also at home visà-vis the domestic population (Walsh 2022) when making the political community both pure and free of invisible risks (see below, Chapter 4). A case in point is the adoption of Psychoactive Substances Act (2016) in the United Kingdom which, according to David Nutt, defined as psychoactive any chemical that stimulated or depressed the central nervous system so for the first time ever in the U.K. drugs were banned even if they were not harmful. In fact, psychoactive drugs are now illegal even if they are good for you, and make you more intelligent, live longer and be a nicer person! The Act is prospective as well as retrospective so even substances that have not yet been discovered will be illegal once they are. (2020: 449)

The decision by the British government to criminalise the possession of Nitrous Oxide in March 2023 seems to continue along the same path (Rolles 2023). Resurgent sovereignty is enacted in the field of governmentality. Similarly, and at first perhaps counterintuitively, it does not cancel out neoliberal pressures that, as we detail in the case study below, manifest themselves also in global drug control. Indeed, the 1980s and 1990s were the decades of the ‘retreat of the state’ (Strange 1996). It was a time when power shifted from political authorities to markets—as systems of power,

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rather than neutral sites of interaction productive of just momentary, instantly appearing and disappearing connections and shifting states of equilibrium without social integrative function—to the corporate sector, eroding the (sovereign) power tied to territory in the process. Yet, just like the illumination of space removing obstacles to unimpeded sight for external supervisors is a fundament to neoliberal market civilisation management (Gill 1995), so is the state, which in addition to these external supervisors (global governance institutions) is indispensable in policing, regulating and protecting liberal government against its political, economic and social alternatives (Harvey 2005: 2). An unresolved tension thus existed between the neoliberal ideological movement to limit public expenditure and reduce the scope of state action on one hand, and the responsibility of the state for the government of transnational economic relations on the other. It was, as van Apeldoorn (2010) argues, present also in the ‘embedded neoliberalism’ associated with the EU’s model of economic government seeking to maintain some level of social protection but ending up seized with ‘marketisation’ as maintaining institutional preconditions for markets to grow and market mechanisms to expand (van Apeldoorn and Horn 2007). This has had clear effects on drug policy—including in terms of increased responsibilisation for the conduct of human somatic selves (see previous chapter). But not only does the state not leave the stage and harbours the same illusions of control over transnational drug flows penetrating the limits of its sovereignty. In line with Strange’s (1996) notion of ‘symbiosis’, the resurgent sovereignty combines and coalesces with neoliberal governmentality, including in the traditionally sovereigntist realm par excellence of security (see Leander 2016, on the analysis of the private military companies and their relations to the state). In the past decade, since the global financial crisis, this process is moreover amplified by the ascent of new populism that frames ‘sovereignty’ and (bordered) territory as a natural container of an ethnically homogenous people (Davies 2021) and makes it a centrepiece of political debate (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017). The new populists enact strategies of authoritarian, ‘mutant neoliberalism’ (Callison and Manfredi 2020) that combine the neoliberal governmentality (market liberalism) with nationalist, political illiberalism. Finally, a certain zone of indistinction in drug control policy between democracy and authoritarianism manifests itself also through the constitutive interplay of power and knowledge which we explore in more detail

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in the following chapter. Suffice it to say here that the ‘evidence-based paradigm’ struggles to meet the Enlightenment ideal of public scrutiny that one would associate with policy making in open, democratic societies. Instead, privileged knowledge formations produce hierarchies of evidence while the technocratic rationality limits the extent of political debate over objectives to be achieved. The problematisation process whereby the ‘problem’ to be solved by policy is defined (cf. also Bacchi 2012) is reserved to the secluded, privileged domain of knowledge and related— in near absence of controversies—to implicit, underlying reasons that can rely on science that is methodologically flawed, outdated or relying on unfounded yet dominant cultural representations. This means that the ‘fire fighting’ to solve the problem can be done without a nuanced view of the complex effects that policy interventions have in society. The policy compartmentalisation, recorded in the area of drug control, e.g. by Moore and Fraser (2013) who trace how the subject construction of the subjectivity of the person using drugs is formed by the notion of ‘addiction’ conceived and examined in separation from other domains, has therefore biopolitical effects in addition to producing inefficiencies—and possibly new problems to be resolved. In democracy, Jasanoff observes (2005: 258), the public arena should be a place where competing knowledge claims are tested—needless to say, this does not mean that everyone is entitled to their own ‘science’ that suits their prejudice—, and where, at the same time, the credibility of state actions is established. This is currently not the case in drug policy even in democratic states. Lancaster, Duke and Ritter (2015) therefore suggest how more democratic participation—even beyond deliberative process including ‘reasoned discussion’ that imposes constraints on the inclusion of marginalised yet relevant knowledge—can improve drug policy. They stress that theirs is not a challenge to the authority of science, but rather of the technocratic policy process and its inherent limitations. Another venue to release knowledge from the current binds and embrace, in a deliberative manner, the multiplicity of evidence while stimulating democratic engagement is inspired by the reflectivist, or interpretive literature on drug science that foregrounds the inherently social construction of problems (for a review of this literature, see Gstrein 2018) and challenges the naïve concept of (single and uncontestable) evidence—rather than evidences —or the impact of evidence on policy. As we argue in more detail in the next chapter, the problem is less that evidence is not sufficiently integrated into the policy process. It is rather the existing power/

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knowledge nexus that should be subjected to critical scrutiny lest the traditional theory consolidates and reproduces the status quo unfavourable to the marginalised and the excluded.

2.2

The Bohemian Case: A Study of Nonequations

Czechoslovakia launched the transition from socialist authoritarianism to democracy in 1989. The Velvet Revolution produced a liberal democratic state, which a few years later fragmented dissolved peacefully into two successor ones—the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The revolution also signalled a transition in the country’s repressive drug policy. However, tracing the evolution of Czech political system and drug policy shows that the pressures of resurgent sovereignty and mutating neoliberalism— embodied par excellence by the prime minister and later president Václav Klaus—left their marks even in this case of one of the more progressive drug policies in the region and beyond. The early decriminalisation (1990) aimed at reducing governmental control in this domain, yet it was also complemented by a set of social measures that distanced it from pure neoliberalism. It is likely that the fact that capitalism was built in the Czech Republic without capitalists—in other words, by an alliance of dissident intelligentsia (Václav Havel), economic technocrats (Václav Klaus) and former managers played a role, as the resulting ‘governmentality of managerialism’ that was supported both by neoliberal orthodoxy and the notion of self-organising civil society, was actually toned down as a result (Eyal et al. 1998). At the end of the decade, drug use was then ‘recriminalised’, absent any particular political change; only to be mossderately decriminalised later (2010–). Throughout, progressive measures remained inscribed in the system, manifested in evidence-based approach which in this case balanced resurgent sovereignty, social services and the gradually developing integrated ‘addiction policy’ concept—a courtesy of strong technocratic actors in the system. These progressive tendencies were checked, though not reversed, with the advent of the government dominated by a populist movement of Andrej Babiš in the late 2010s, only to come back forcefully now due to the sponsorship of the Pirate party, a junior partner in the current government. Czechoslovakia has a long history of both research in psychotropic substances—notably LSD—and addictions. When it came to policy, however, with the socialist authoritarian regime in place, the ‘drug

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problem’ was to be resolved in punitive terms,2 with absence of any comprehensive approach even as primary prevention programmes at schools were introduced in the 1980s, externalised and aligned with western ‘decadence’ against which fortification including impenetrable outside borders was needed. In the popular period crime series 30 pˇrípadu˚ majora Zemana [Major Zeman’s Thirty Cases], the protagonist exasperates once in an episode designed to denounce young members of the political dissent underground ‘so the drugs finally made it to this republic of ours’. In fact, they were always there, with the regime notoriously slow to update the national list of substances. But, in the period assessment, cited not for its (dubious) empirical value but rather to illustrate the official regime line, [t]he loss of social security, characteristic for earlier forms of life, caused strong sentiments of uncertainty, unease, anxiety, alienation, deprivation and danger with certain population groups. In the conditions of capitalist society, these provide fertile ground for explosion of pathological phenomena such as criminality, prostitution, suicides—and, last but not least, also abuse of alcohol and drugs. These social processes have not been absent in the socialist countries—where, however, they have not developed nearly to such threatening, out-of-control proportions. (Šedivý a Válková 1988: 144, quoted in Jelínková 2022: 44)

Yet a dramatic increase in trafficking of substances and illicit drugs was only recorded after the Velvet Revolution (1989). Unlike some other countries of the former Communist bloc, however, the Czech Republic adopted a pragmatic or ‘balanced’ approach (a self-referential term, appearing also in academic literature, cf. Belackova and Stefunkova 2018) that did not rely solely on law enforcement. While during the authoritarian period not only manufacturing, trade and supply, but also possession of any illicit drug constituted a criminal offence; ‘decriminalisation’ was enacted in 1990. It was moreover complemented by harm reduction measures and the establishment of low-threshold services. In the government’s own later reflection, the emergence of the drug policy in the 1990s was consciously associated with opening of borders 2 The key legal framework was provided by a penal law 140/1961 Coll., Illegal Production and Possession of Narcotic Substances and Poisons. Czechoslovakia was also a signatory to the Single Convention (1961), with reservations made regarding the independent gathering and assessment of statistical data.

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(and its adverse effects) but also democratisation and the reduction of government’s direct control over the life of society.3 It would thus appear that democratisation and progressive drug policy went hand in hand—a political rupture was immediately followed by liberalisation in the drug domain. However, as suggested earlier, the story is not a straightforward one. In the late 1990s, a strong pressure emerged to reverse decriminalisation, caused by a societal securitisation of the drug problem—which was in part racialised since it was aligned with the operation of nonnative organised crime groups from the ‘East’, and linked to socially excluded communities with high ratios of the Roma population. The domestic pressures of resurgent sovereignty were actually reinforced also by an international one in this case, from the bodies such as INCB (Csete 2012: 10). As a result, possession of the amount ‘greater than small’ was recriminalised. To much criticism, and popular derision, the amount was not set in a transparent manner. It was determined only in nonbinding and internal law enforcement guidelines. At the same time, the government commissioned a rigorous impact study of the change in the legislation that was undertaken in the following years (1999–2001). The study’s conclusions that the prohibitionist approach was ineffective and socially disadvantageous later served to support a (re-)liberalisation that took place in 2010. The reversal in the 1990s coincided with the political change following the June 1998 election after which an ‘opposition treaty’ between the two largest parties, Civic Democrats (ODS) and Social Democrats (CSSD) was concluded, allowing a minority government of the latter. The agreement was criticised as a de facto cartel that negatively determined Czech politics for years to come (cf. Kopeˇcek 2015). However, the restrictive drug law was adopted before the election, was proposed in the ˇ parliament by a member of the Christian Democratic party (KDU-CSL)— traditionally the champion of restrictive policy on moral grounds, and ˇ ironically at times in alliance with the Communists (KSCM) apparently motivated by the nostalgia of more state control (Zábranský 2004; cf. Csete 2012: 19)—and was not controversial subject in the campaign.4

3 See e.g. an infosheet available at https://www.vlada.cz/assets/ppov/protidrogova-pol itika/GCDPC_information_1.pdf (undated). 4 It was substantially debated in 1998 before the final bill was passed but then returned to the Parliament following the veto of the then president Václav Havel (cf. Zeman 2007).

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Therefore, a link between the recriminalisation and democratic backsliding cannot be established here. In 2010, the penal code was reformed again in reflection of the failure of the previous, more prohibitionist approach. The new law and the accompanying government decrees formalised and specified what constituted a ‘small amount’, made modifications distinguishing different types of drugs and instituting a less serious penalty for the possession of nonsignificant amount of cannabis. The law also codified ‘personal cultivation’ so that it could not be classified as drug manufacturing. Therefore, it advanced decriminalisation in the sense that less serious acts, namely possession and cultivation for personal use, were classified as minor offences that did not trigger criminal sanction. The cultivation or possession of small amounts was still punishable by an administrative sanction up to 600 EUR, however, and production, distribution and handling even when related to personal use in the amount ‘greater than small’ continued to constitute a criminal act. Moreover, the Constitutional Court later invalidated the government decrees specifying the ‘greater than small amounts’, prompting another court to adopt limits that were more strict for cannabis and methamphetamine (European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction 2020) before another ruling (2021) that did not challenge the concept but leaves it to courts to establish on an ad hoc basis whether in a given case the amount indeed passed the threshold. The law, which remains in force, thus represents a moderate shift towards less prohibitionist rationality rather than a radical one. It should be pointed out that the Czech drug/addiction policy system in its entirety has consistently displayed progressive features since it started to take shape in 1993. Harm reduction has been inscribed in the system since inception—and in time even codified—as much as prevention (enrolling also NGOs) and monitoring and analysis to provide data (collated by National Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Addiction) for genuine evidence-based policy while the network of services was gradually expanded. The drug policy was also progressively institutionalised (for a concise overview, see Office of the Government 2022). In 2002, the Government Council for Drug Policy Coordination was founded. It was chaired by the prime minister while the national drug coordinator served as the executive vice chair. In 2007, the council was expanded to include not only representatives of the central government, but also NGOs (through the Association of Nongovernmental Organisations engaged in

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drug prevention and treatment), professional associations and regional governing bodies, thus embodying the partnership between public administration and civil society which has been progressively more involved in drug policy (Sarosi 2021). NGOs have been involved in providing various services, most notably the low-threshold centres (‘nízkoprahová centra’), treatment programmes, daytime residential centres or therapeutic communities. They are also knowledge providers due to their extensive fieldwork, feeding it to the National Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Addictions (E/CN.7/2023/CRP.4). While in the 2000s licit drugs such as alcohol and tobacco were included in the national drug policy strategy, it was only later that its comprehensive character became truly salient. The concept of integrated policy, encompassing both legal drugs and gambling, was fully endorsed in 2014 (Office of the Government 2022). Later, it included abuse of psychoactive medicines and even excessive use of the internet and digital technologies. As a result, the policy was rebranded as ‘addiction’.5 This propelled a revision of the national strategy—now covering prevention, treatment and social reintegration, harm reduction and supply control pillars—and the mandate of the government council. The progressive movement was checked, however, by the government of Andrej Babiš (ANO). The respected national coordinator, Jindˇrich Voboˇril, left his position in 2018. Babiš and his movement are sometimes included among the new populists and concerns have been voiced during his tenure about the privatisation of the state and the decline of liberal democracy. However, while Voboˇril, who has advocated progressive policies, —has been reinstated as the national coordinator after the last election (2021) that resulted in Babiš’ withdrawal to opposition— was critical of the Babiš government, the latter did not engage in any revolutionary reversal (e.g. towards repression). The strategy (Secretariat of the Government Council 2019) it endorsed only did not include the more progressive measures Voboˇril had written into its early draft—such as increased excise tax on the alcohol or the use of a portion of the

5 This ‘rebranding’ has parallels elsewhere too. For example, in Spain the National Plan on Drugs (PNSD) incorporated the concept of non-substance (or behavioural) addictions in reference to pathological gambling, but also video games, screens or social networks. This type of behaviours are therefore incorporated to the broader drug policy strategy. See Delegación del Gobierno para el PNSD (2022).

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government profit from alcohol, tobacco and gambling for prevention and treatment. The approach by the new government (2021–) formed by five coalition parties (Civic Democrats, Christian Democrats, TOP09, STAN and the Pirates) now returns to a more progressive outlook that favours biopolitical interventions based on the concern with the health of individuals and society over (‘sovereigntist’) prohibition and coercion. The strategy continues to be founded on a conscious abolishment of the distinction between licit and illicit psychoactive substances (an ‘integrative concept’). Remarkably, the government openly recognises that the ‘legal status of substances and the degree to which they are regulated by law are not always closely related to the risk to public health and society’ (Office of the Government of the Czech Republic 2022: 2). To rectify the situation, it prepares proposals for a regulated cannabis market and other progressive measures (see below).6 These twists notwithstanding, drug/addiction policy has maintained a broadly progressive outlook since its conception in the early 1990s, due to the agency and positionality of strong technocratic actors. In terms of social control, the problematisation governing the practices of the state apparatus has focused on the prevalence among the youth—with a declared focus on individual, but also social health, i.e. unobstructed socialisation processes. Indeed, in the public and political discourse, the production and prevalence of illicit substances has been racialised, producing both externalisation and internalisation effects that displayed a certain continuity with the country’s authoritarian past. Consistent with those earlier narratives, drugs have been rendered an external, imported problem associated with immigration.7 This discourse has been resurgent 6 The prevalence of illicit drug use is more or less stable—very high compared to EU’s average in cannabis, and relatively high in MDMA. The most common illegal substances are currently cannabis and methamphetamine (locally referred to as ‘pervitin’). The Czech Republic has the highest number of methamphetamine production sites in Europe, but as these are predominantly (90%) small scale uncomparable to industrial sites in the Netherlands, Belgium or Mexico, it does not rank as the greatest producer. The production of cannabis herb has increased over the recent years. The industrial production located in the Czech Republic, and intended for export, has been associated predominantly with Serb and Macedonian organised crime groups (Národní protidrogová centrála 2021). The law enforcement has been focused on large-scale cultivation, creating a competitive small-scale production market that has pushed the prices down (Belackova et al. 2015). 7 An illustrative example of the linkage between immigration and drugs during the migration crisis (2015–) seeking to create a moral panic was by a representative of the

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particularly in the new populist milieu and since the last migration crisis (2015). The internalisation concerns a set of territorialising narratives that locate the problem in the pockets of inside territory, formally described as ‘socially excluded areas’ which often feature higher-than-average ratios of Roma population. Unsupported by publicly available data, these narratives conform to and reproduce the racial stereotypical subjectivity of ‘asocials’. Notably, the pockets are usually located in economically disadvantaged frontier areas of the country, resulting in a double interiorisation and a rendering of a particular version of the (narco)borderscape, a concept we introduce and deploy later in the book. That said, the racialisation present in the public discourse does not seem more significantly inscribed in the governmental practice—again, likely a result of a strong technocratic agency. The police reports do point out the ethnic nature of organised crime groups (Vietnamese or Balkanese) and their transnational cooperative practices (cf. Národní protidrogová centrála 2022) and, e.g. inclusion strategies link the probability of problematic drug use and gambling with the population of socially excluded areas and speak of clustering of phenomena that characterise the life in those areas, such as poverty, indebtedness, lack of professional opportunities and historical and structural dynamics of discrimination. This then orients the inclusion practices that encompass also decreasing the use of psychoactive substances by socially excluded persons (cf. Ministerstvo práce a sociálních vˇecí 2020). There is little evidence, however, that the drug/addiction policy would be instrumentalised by the government to engage in deeper interventions of the kind that can be witnessed in (narco)borderscapes such as Campo di Gibraltar treated in detail later in the book. The role of technocracy has been visible also in the commitment to evidence-based approaches. This has been reaffirmed most recently when the government set evidence- (and human rights-) based approaches as

SPD (National Socialists) Radim Fiala who used the public broadcaster information that many of detained dealers over a preceding period of Wenceslaus Square in Prague— for a long a local site of controversy over more or less restrictive approach to drug users featuring the police and NGOs—were from Africa to claim that they were ‘illegal migrants’ and used it as a ‘proof’ that the government was lying the people about migration. The statement is available at https://www.spd.cz/6084-radim-fiala-drogy-v-centru-prahy-jsoudistribuovane-africkymi-imigranty/. For an earlier, more comprehensive treatment of the parameters of the public debate, see Zábranský (2004).

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priorities for the recent Czech Presidency in the Council of the European Union (Office of the Government of the Czech Republic 2022). While these approaches can be controversial and generate paradoxes that we explore in the next chapter, in the Czech case evidence has overall been used to broaden, rather than narrow the field of visibility and contest political and public prejudice regarding what passes for effective drug policies. A case example here is the commissioning of the impact study that complemented the adoption of the prohibitionist legislation in the late 1990s. The outcomes of the study could then be used in a public and expert debate about the impact of the prohibitionist approach, leading to the later revision of the law.) It is beyond dispute that evidence in the Czech case has been used to promote a certain policy of drug control. The technocratic attitude, while enrolling independent expertise and assessment to legitimise it, cannot meaningfully be considered apolitical. However, its embedding in the broader milieu of knowledge and actual distributed practice by both state and nonstate (civil society) actors promoting prevention or harm reduction show that evidence can be harnessed not only for coercive, or prohibitionist ends—but also the biopolitical ones concerned with the health of individuals and populations. It can also act to redefine the ‘problem’—rather than merely reinforce the status quo. An example is ongoing funding of the research of anti-depressive effects of psilocybin and ketamine conducted by the National Institute of the Mental Health (notably at the Psychedelic Research Center) as well as treatment possibilities in clinics offering psychedelic therapy8 —even if, for the time being, the debate regarding the potentially beneficial effects of psychedelics in treatment (including palliative care) remains for the most on the public margins (Postránecká et al. 2019; Chomynová et al. 2022). The progressive tendency has been ongoing even against the international drug control regime’s pressure for uniformity and consistency. The Czech Republic ratified all key regime’s treaties. In the 1990s, it was criticised for its liberal policy while it spoke critically in its own turn of the repressive approaches associated with ‘war on drugs’ at international fora. Now it seeks to break a new ground without leaving the premises of the international norms. Under Voboˇril as the reinstated national drug coordinator’s lead, a new legislation is prepared that would lead to the creation

8 For more information, see https://www.psyon.cz.

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of regulated cannabis markets (Prague Morning 2023)—a plan supported also by the new president Petr Pavel—and further relaxation of the prohibitionist approach. The proposal is premised on the problematisation of the current legislation and strict court rulings that abide by this rationality. A recent ruling that became a subject of controversy involved a decision by a court to condemn to several years in prison a couple for sharing Ayahuasca (a decoction of the Amazonian vine Banisteriopsis caapi with a history of traditional use in the Amazonia) with participants of therapeutic sessions organised in the manner of shamanist rituals (Dleštíková 2022). President Miloš Zeman then pardoned the couple citing the disproportion between the punishment and the public health and social threat of the behaviour, and referring to recommendations by experts including Voboˇril. This, however, was an extraordinary (‘corrective’) measure, and Voboˇril himself publicly referred around that time to the current legal status as a ‘big social experiment that is not working’ (Czech Radio 2022.) The government’s position is that the new legislation, which may come into force by 2024, indeed must remain aligned to IDCR’s rules, yet while promoting decriminalisation, destigmatisation, prevention and regulated legal market, it can move within the confines of a ‘differentiated approach’ in both legislation and justice and law enforcement. The government also coordinates the proposal with several other EU’s member states including Germany, Luxembourg, Malta (cf. Government of Luxembourg 2022)—the first EU member state to have regulated social access to recreational cannabis (2021)—and the Netherlands. The idea of regulated market is strongly supported by the Pirates party, currently a junior government partner. It is the only party for which drug control has been consistently a salient issue. Indeed, when Andrej Babiš considered them as the most serious political threat before the last general election, he would seek to render their prospective ascent to power as a threat in the eyes of the more conservative constituencies by claiming that they were ‘neomarxists’ allegedly in favour of migration and drugs.9 An antisystem party by birth, the Pirates have interestingly incorporated in their advocacy of the regulated market the argument that taxing the legal

9 ‘You are a threat to this country. You favour immigration, your neomarxist views are well known, you are the extreme left and you propagate drugs’, Babiš was reported as saying during a Chamber of Deputies’ session on 17 Dec. 2020. Blesk, available at https://www.blesk.cz/clanek/zpravy-politika/664312/babis-utoci-na-piraty-jstenejvetsi-ohrozeni-zeme-propagujete-drogy-bartos-komediant.html.

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exchange of cannabis would benefit the strained public finances. (The proposal to be prepared by Voboˇril is to include also excise tax on new tobacco products such as electronic cigarettes and nicotine patches.) The market is thus to provide the solution where politics have failed—there is hardly anything neomarxist about that.

2.3

Conclusion

The Czech case shows how the transition to liberal government produced a more liberal drug control. It also illuminates something else, however, which as of yet has not received much attention—the nonlinearity of the process as a result of the resurgent sovereignty (including through new populist public discourse) and the neoliberal pressures that have been countered, by and large, by strong technocratic actors harbouring progressive ideas about drug policy. While from the progressive standpoint the outcome, and the expectations of forthcoming reform, may be seen as positive, it raises issues of democratic legitimacy—since the technocratic positions were clearly not apolitical —even if now the progressive drug policy agenda is championed by a political actor in government, the Pirate party. We will return to the pressures in the global drug control apparatus, in which the Czech Republic now seeks creatively to find own (‘differentiated’) pathways, in the conclusion. In the next two chapters, on the other hand, we will first focus on the role of knowledge in drug control—and show how ‘evidence-based’ approaches may not only challenge, but also (and more often) support the status quo agendas, and by extension, the coercive and punitive policies. Then, we will conduct a microstudy of the (narco)borderscape as a site—and internal one, too, but now from a European perspective.

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Tinasti, Khalid. 2020. The Neo-Patrimonial ‘Use’ of Drug Policy in Electoral Processes. Drug Policies and Development 12 /2020. Uprimny, Rodrigo, Diana Esther, Guzmán, and Jorge Alberto Parra. 2012. La adicción punitiva: La desproporción de leyes de Drogas en América Latina. Colectivo de Estudios Drogas y Derecho (CEDD)/DeJusticia. Available at: https://www.dejusticia.org/publication/la-adiccion-punitiva-la-despropor cion-de-leyes-en-america-latina/. Van Apeldoorn, Bastiaan. 2010. Transnational European Capitalism and the Struggle over European Integration. London: Routledge. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1984. The Politics of the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walsh, John. 2022. Las consecuencias catastróficas de la prohibición de las drogas en las Américas. Washington Office on Latin America. Available at: https://www.wola.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Consecuen cias-Catastroficas_WOLA_Julio-2022.pdf. Zabransky, Tomas. 2004. Czech Drug Laws as an Arena of the Drug Policy Battle. Journal of Drug Issues 34 (4): 661–686. Zabransky, Tomas. 2007. Metamphetamine in the Czech Republic. Journal of Drug Issues 37 (1): 155–180. Zeman, Petr. 2007. Legislation and Practice Concerning Prosecution of Drug Offenses in the Czech Republic. Journal of Drug Issues 37 (1): 45–72.

CHAPTER 3

Which Knowledge Deserves to Be Named Knowledge: The Place for Science and Evidence in Drug Policy

Abstract This chapter unpacks the relationship of power and knowledge in the global drug control dispositif. First, a few general observations are made about the operation of power and knowledge in this dispositif, focusing in particular on its visibility function in relation to the field where policy interventions take place, the ‘problematisation’ that moves its gears, and the importance, but also ambiguity, of the concept of ‘evidence’ in drug policy. Existing hierarchies of knowledge that produce privileged formations and marginalise and make invisible traditional or decolonised forms are surveyed. Finally, a specific controversy related to these hierarchies that concerns (re-)scheduling of cannabis in the international drug control regime is explored. Interrogating this case shows the dynamic becoming of the regime. Keywords Evidence-based policy · Knowledge · Human rights · Cannabis · International drug scheduling · Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) · Expert Committee on Drug Dependence

The exercise of power produces, and simultaneously depends on the existence of a correlative field of knowledge. The drug control dispositif is no exception. The multilayered hierarchies produced by the operation of the dispositif in regard to populations subjected to the apparatus’ gaze © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 O. Ditrych and C. Sánchez Avilés, Governing Human Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43552-2_3

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and practices are correlated and reinforced by a particular knowledge formation—the discipline of drug science, consisting of truth statements about substances used for design and legitimisation of drug policies. This formation exhibits a hierarchy of evidence—what is considered reliable and valuable knowledge. Research on molecules and adverse effects are predominant, and social sciences, traditional knowledge or communitarian expertise, as well as research on positive effects, are generally not considered as a similarly legitimate basis for decision-making, instead being marginalised through lack of funding and stigmatisation. The feedback loop between knowledge production and power relations makes escaping the systemic inertia a challenge. In this chapter, we unpack the relationship of power and knowledge in the global drug control dispositif. First, we make a few general observations about the operation of power and knowledge in this dispositif, focusing in particular on its visibility function in relation to the field where policy interventions take place, the ‘problematisation’ that moves its gears, and the importance, but also ambiguity, of the concept of ‘evidence’ in drug policy. We survey existing hierarchies of knowledge that produce privileged formations and marginalise and make invisible traditional or decolonised forms. Finally, we zoom into a specific controversy related to these hierarchies that concerns (re-)scheduling of cannabis in the international drug control regime. Interrogating this case shows the dynamic becoming of the regime. It matters also because it is in controversies that implicit knowledge surfaces about the material world that cannot be read otherwise than from the practice it governs (Bueger and Gadinger 2015; cf. Adler and Pouliot 2011) and is made into a subject of deliberation, creating the potential for displacement, revision and innovation since controversies are not merely conflicts over what makes reality (‘common world’), but are productive of (multiple) new realities from which political alternatives to the status quo can emerge.

3.1 Power and Knowledge in Drug Control: General Observations In this introductory section, we situate our argument in the broader discussion about the making of a privileged knowledge formation and its constitutive effects. These constitutive effects consist in the production of a certain field of visibility and articulating mechanisms that shape the formation of practical political rationalities and technologies deployed

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in the global drug control dispositif. The knowledge formation is thus a founding element of political rationalities that make social reality intelligible and actionable by defining regulative ideals (how things should be), problematisations (unconformities to these ideals ) and reformatory programmes (making the problems disappear). Foucault’s dispositif is a ‘complex edifice’ (Foucault 2007: 8) that includes, among other things, scientific statements. For, in his familiar dictum, ‘there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge’ (Foucault 1979: 27). The relationship is a constitutive one. Exercise of power produces knowledge—and knowledge has effects on power constellations. These power constellations depend on a series of authoritative truth claims that serve to (re-)stabilise them by means of asserting how things are at the moment (‘facts’) but also how things always are (‘theories’). Facts establish a field of vision, while theories govern the policy practice, producing expectations of certain future effects. However sincerely they may feel about the general (dis)utility of theory, agents in the government apparatuses rely on and intertextually refer to knowledge in the particular domain established, including through their validating practice, as an authoritative one. Dispositif, as pointed out in the introductory chapter with reference to Gilles Deleuze (1992), has an important visibility function. It is a machine that makes us see. It distributes the visible and the invisible according to a particular ‘regime of light’. This regime does not illuminate. Rather, it generates or eliminates objects which cannot exist without it. It is composed of lines of visibility, utterance, force, subjectivation, etc. Seeing is a condition of doing—in this case, of (reformatory) political action. A ready example in the drug control regime is UNODC’s World Drug Reports , produced at the very site where scientific and political practice meet in the drug control regime. Production of these reports testifies to the importance of numbers as inscription devices that are constitutive of calculable (and controllable) spaces indispensable for the conduct of the modern government at distance, with statistics as the key facilitative knowledge for the exercise of biopower through measurement and data collection (Sánchez Avilés and Ditrych 2020). Yet, despite the scientific claim to the process of mapping the ‘world drug problem’ and its evolution, the nature of the evidence—and the means of data collection through ARQs (Annual Reports Questionnaires ) submitted by nation states—of the scale and intensity of this key object of knowledge has been

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subject to serious critical scrutiny for failing to meet basic standards of scientific inquiry (cf. Hallam and Bewley-Taylor 2010a). The visibility function is performed in at least two related ways. The first is through problematisations as parts of political rationalities. The second is through hierarchies of evidence that serve to establish authoritative truth claims drawing on objectivist and empiricist ontologies—yet often failing to conform to the latter’s ideals. The notion of problematisation embodies the idea that rather than being simple descriptions of objects and relations, ‘problems’ are productive of objects (and subjects) that they make governable. In an attempt to produce a singular reality—with research methodology playing a significant role here (cf. Mol 2002)—, ontological creations are manufactured around which policies intended to erase them are articulated. Their professed effort to pursue the irrefutable, objective logic of scientific inquiry notwithstanding, scientists partake in this ontological creation of ‘problems’ and their normative hierarchies—e.g. by means of classification of addictive substances that inevitably betrays value judgments (Kalant 2010)—which makes them complicit, as proponents of Horkheimer’s traditional theory (cf. Horkheimer 1982 [1937]), in the conservation of the existing social order. Problematisation, it is important to emphasise, does not concern fabrication, or manufacturing of social fiction. Rather, it is productive in terms of establishing objects as having stable, timeless essences. In drug control, the stabilisation of ‘drug’ has been a perennial task and, as Herschinger (2015) suggests, the basic condition of the drug control dispositif. The drug, after all, both cures and relieves pain, but may also be potentially harmful to human bodies is a subject of human desire yet is problematised as a threat to the social order; and due to modern science capable of producing new synthetic substances, not only is its meaning ambivalent, but its materiality is ever unstable. In international drug control, the technology of stabilisation at the heart of the apparatus is ‘schedules’ which seek to suppress the ambivalence and inscribe individual substances with a particular, relational and situational degree of danger—the use of some substances is licit in particular heterotopias such as hospitals and laboratories (Ditrych and Sanchéz-Avilés 2019). The latter part of this chapter describes in detail how science and a certain hierarchy of evidence are implicated in this ordering and problematisation practice that enables the construction of a map of intensities of the drug problem—and so, how problematisation and hierarchy

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of evidence functions are intertwined in the production of a particular field of visibility. The issue of problematisation has been a subject of critical and constructivist drug policy research, seeking to sensitise the audience to the ways in which thought is constitutive of our political and human condition (Koopman 2013) and challenging the positivist notion that claims to truth can be treated as completely external to the social reality to which they refer. Bachi (2012) or Lancaster et al. (2015) explore how consumption of certain substances becomes a problem—an antecedent condition for political action—, while Fraser (2016) traces how the social construct of addiction shapes policy practice, e.g. by terms of reducing the complexity of the phenomenon to enable easy fixes. Researchers operating in this paradigm propose to situate problematisation into a broader interpretive framework in which ‘addiction’ can be rendered as an assemblage that includes practices of knowledge-making that are productive of ontological realities (Fraser et al. 2014: 237). The aim is to trace relations and alignments rather than seeking universal certainties. ‘Drug use’ can thus be seen as a network of relations between bodies, objects, substances and practices (Duff 2013); and ‘drug’ itself is conceived not as just materialising, together with addiction, in the drug control dispositif, but also as a (material) actant, doing things to actors (Keane 2013). This critical paradigm starts from the idea that scientific processes produce their objects (Moore 2011: 82). It stands in opposition to both against the empiricist search for conjunctions (recurrent patterns), and causal mechanisms explored by critical realists (cf. Stevens 2020). It allows for often invisible role of knowledge and expertise in shaping, maintaining but also potentially subverting relations of power—captured in Jasanoff (2004)’s idiom of ‘coproduction’ that gestures towards simultaneous production of natural and social orders to avoid ‘deletions’ and focuses on social dimensions of cognitive commitments. Drawing on the long pedigree of research in science and technology studies, to examine coproductions at various scales Jasanoff proposes to interrogate four particular areas: emergence and stabilisation of new objects, framing and resolution of controversies (as episodes when ideas are contested), intelligibility and portability of scientific facts across time, place and institutional contexts, and cultural practices of science.

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For science is indeed a cultural practice where meanings are exchanged to make sense of the world through stories that achieve their truth functions—transforming the particular, cultural and ideological into something that appears universal, natural and purely empirical (Weber 2014). The challenge to the authority of scientific knowledge (cf. Latour 2018) and the competition in claiming democratic political imagination with (social) media representations (cf. Ezrahi 2004) notwithstanding, to speak science continues to have a powerful legitimising effect; and conversely, to say something is ‘unscientific’ continues to elicit condemnation and erasure. Beyond such binaries, the disciplining function of science generates also the hierarchies of evidence, as plentifully evidenced in the drug science (see below) where not only traditional knowledge or communitarian expertise, but to some extent even social sciences are not considered as sources of valid truth claims that can be used to guide political action. This despite the fact that there is no universal criterion of what constitutes science—i.e. whether it is logical consistency of propositions series, empirical observability, predictive accuracy or something else entirely. The disciplining function of saying ‘not science’ in drug control research is well illustrated in the familiar trope of ‘insufficient clinical evidence’. A powerful denunciative claim which however remains ambiguous and without clear contours, it betrays allegiance to a certain, yet idealised and imprecisely defined standard of scientific inquiry. It disciplines by excluding and delegitimising by labelling that which is situated beyond the pale of ‘proper science’. It simultaneously produces coherence to the ‘normal’ scientific practice, and to the subjectivity of the scientist. It is not without seduction, for it seemingly confers a dispassionate commitment to ongoing exploration of the horizons of knowledge—and so it constitutes an oblique, deferred rejection, yet one with direct and immediate political effects, for example in terms of foreclosing to broaden the field of visibility to include traditional or decolonised forms of knowledge, and so reinforcing established hierarchies of evidence. This rejection of alternative knowledge in relevant epistemic communities indeed draws on a commitment to a certain scientific method. Yet it can hardly be considered truly empiricist, because by making certain ontological and methodological wagers a priori, it is bound to produce a narrow representation of the complex social reality.1 Finally, the practice of drug research 1 Vitellone (2017)’ s social science of the syringe, inspired by ANT, would constitute a more piercing type of empiricism in this respect.

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that serves policy by engaging in ‘mapping the problem’ is often at odds with the norm of submitting scientific claims to public review through what Ezrahi (1990) termed and traced as the ‘attestive visual culture’ that was established in the Enlightenment not only as a paradigm of science contesting private and speculative forms of knowledge, but also as a paradigm of democratic political action in which the government generates legitimacy not by recourse to secret reasons of state, but public scrutiny.

3.2 Knowledge, Science and Power in the Context of Drug Control: The Paradox of Evidence-Based Drug Policy Let us now explore some of the previously introduced issues in more detail. That drug policy is based on evidence is a controversial claim that however is frequently found in drug policy documents. The 2022 update from the European Union (EU) Early Warning System affirms that ‘good decisions begin with good data’ (EMCDDA 2022: 3, 30 and ff.). The EU Drugs Strategy 2021–2025 states that the objective of cross-cutting field of research, innovation and foresight is to contribute to elucidating ‘what constitutes effective interventions, so as to provide a sound evidence base for necessary policy development and practice’ (Council EU 2021: 29 and ff.). The UN system coordination Task Team on the Implementation of the UN System Common Position on drug-related matters maintains that ‘investment in data and evidence-based research pays off in more effective and efficient policies’ (UN Task Team 2019: 38). However, what constitutes valid scientific evidence—and what does not—is contested in practice. As in other areas of public policy, knowledge and evidence have not necessarily guided drug-related political decisions, or programmes and interventions implemented in this area (Hallam and Bewley-Taylor 2010b). In those cases where scientific evidence has been integrated into the decision-making process, such evidence has not always been comprehensive and inclusive (Lancaster et al. 2017). The scope of the knowledge taken into consideration has fluctuated depending on the scientific discipline that generated it, the methodology used or the agent from whom it came. The knowledge produced by epidemiology, biomedicine and other experimental sciences has been considered more ‘valid’ than evidence

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produced by social sciences or humanities—a clear manifestation of a hierarchy of evidence in practice. It is common to hear politicians supporting radically opposed policy proposals on drugs, all of them claiming to be science-based or evidencebased solutions for drug-related ‘problems’. The issue of regulating (or not) cannabis for medicinal or therapeutic uses is a case example. Supporters and detractors resort to the so-called ‘available, up-to-date scientific evidence’ to justify their position in favour of, or against, regulating medical uses of cannabis.2 Something similar occurs in the case of cannabis regulation for adult or recreational uses. Legal regulation of cannabis markets—now proposed in the Czech Republic as discussed in the last chapter—continues to encounter great opposition from international drug control agencies and from most governments in the world, despite the positive results demonstrated (also by evidence) in the cases, for example, of the U.S. states or Uruguay in terms of access to information, quality controls, risk reduction or stabilisation of prevalence of use (Firth et al. 2020; Rivera-Aguirre et al. 2022). (We return to the cannabis controversy later in this chapter.) In the evolution of drug control, prohibition has had a profound and fundamental impact in setting the framework not only for policy, but also for the knowledge that is generated and considered valid about both the effects of illicit substances and the impacts of current drug policies. The type of questions posed, the starting assumptions adopted (whether these bias are explicitly recognised or not), which answers to these questions are considered legitimate, what type of research is funded, even what type of research institutions receive funding to carry out studies in this field (whether public or private) are all strongly influenced by the prohibitionist approach to psychoactive substances (Walker and Netherland 2019). In parallel, this approach of control and prohibition permeates the evaluation of drug policies, and has been crucial in defining the indicators to measure success or failure of policies implemented. The indicators used to measure the extent of the ‘world drug problem’ have been mainly those related to the size of drug markets: the prevalence of use, the areas dedicated to the cultivation of illicit crops, the production/ manufacture of illicit substances or drug-related deaths, among others 2 An example of this dynamic is the debates within the ‘Subcommission in order to analyze experiences of regulation of cannabis for medicinal use’ created in the Spanish Parliament. See Congreso de los Diputados’ website (2021) and Reviejo (2022).

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(Bewley-Taylor 2017). The assessments in this regard included in the World Drug Report mentioned in the first section are good examples (Bewley-Taylor and Nelson 2022). Consequently, the indicators used to determine the success of drug policies do not generally refer to the reduction of harms associated with drug use or illicit drug markets, but rather to the reduction of the size of drug markets: eradication of declared illicit crops, decreases in rates of substance use, drug seizures, or drug-related arrests, to mention a few.3 Both the nominally independent knowledge formation of drug research and the drug control practice have thus been together constitutive of a field of visibility where interventions with measurable impact determined by the definition of the problem (‘problematisation’) can be enacted—and both have been imprinted by the prohibitionist rationality to solve this problem. This rationality conventionally narrows the field of vision for the allegedly depoliticised, technocratic ‘evidence-based approach’ to drug control. (But note that, as discussed in the previous chapter, ‘evidencebased’ approach can also be strategically deployed by technocratic actors to resist political pressure for punitive and prohibitionist policies. While a deviation, it confirms the larger point about the strategic use of knowledge in power struggles.) Moreover, the very notion of evidence often resembles a giant with feet of clay, an ambiguous concept that invokes authority associated with standards of empirical science but regularly fails to conform to them. Drug markets and policy is a field in which compiling and analysing reliable, comprehensive and representative data is very challenging. The illegality and stigma surrounding the use of controlled substances means that few people are honest in reporting their patterns of use. Likewise, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to estimate the real size of illegal drug markets, as these activities fall outside the usual radar of governments or statistical agencies. Most knowledge is based on estimates, which are often provided with enormously wide margins of error (Hallam and Bewley-Taylor 2010a). Similarly, knowledge about markets is not equivalent nor homogeneous for different substances, or for all countries in the world. Yet, important drug policy decisions are claimed to be based on this limited, often politically biased knowledge in which ambiguity and uncertainty are erased using the technology of ‘numbers’ as standardised

3 As an example, see indicators suggested by EMCDDA (2017: 17–18).

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inscription of events and processes (Sanchéz-Avilés and Ditrych 2020; cf. Rose 1999). These decisions concern also allocation of funds for drug control, and the evaluation of implemented policies. If drug policy is claimed to be based on evidence, and this evidence is framed and biased precisely by the policy applied, a paradox arises: policy decisions are based on the knowledge that these same decisions shape and determine. We call this circularity that results from the biomedical-punitive approach to drugs the ‘paradox of evidence-based drug policy’. The biomedical (or pharmacological, medicalised) relates to the individual who uses substances; the punitive (focused on control and criminalisation) relates to the management of the social dimension of drugs, such as recreational use or the impacts of illicit markets (Bouso and Sanchez-Avilés 2022). The paradox of evidence-based drug policy is produced in the process by which prohibitionist policy has perpetuated itself by exclusively funding, or considering valid, that knowledge generated through the methodologies of experimental sciences and with a remarkable prohibitionist bias. Much of the knowledge generated outside mainstream research is not considered as valid evidence, with a sufficient degree of ‘scientificity’. For example, it is very difficult for knowledge generated by groups of people who use drugs (Neale 2017), by reform-minded civil society organisations, or by independent research institutions to have access to decision-making processes. Knowledge coming from biomedical disciplines conducting clinical trials, published in impact journals, funded by prohibitionist-oriented governmental institutions has been privileged, leaving little room also for knowledge coming from the established social sciences, or published in the so-called grey literature. The paradox also applies when it comes to determining who is an ‘expert’ in the field—that is, who deserves to be listened to, consulted or invited to take part in advisory panels or appear before parliamentary commissions (Stevens 2021; Monaghan et al. 2018). As Robert Cox (1981: 128) observed decades ago, every theory is for someone and for something. The drug science is a case in point: for the political, economic and biomedical elites and for ensuring social control through the exercise of the power monopoly over the relationship of individuals and communities with their bodies, and with psychoactive substances.

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3.3 Knowledge, Science and Human Rights in the Context of Drug Control The role of knowledge in drug control in general and the ‘paradox of evidence-based drug policy’ in particular has implications of various kinds. These implications go beyond the mere evaluation of whether public policies work or do not work, or whether public resources are being used efficiently. They also have an impact on the full exercise of human rights: in this case, notably the group of economic, social and cultural rights related to health and science. This is clearly stated in General Comment No. 25 on Science and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, published in 2020 by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which establishes the general principle that research cannot be arbitrarily limited, including in the context of controlled substances (CESC 2020). The prohibitionist bias can lead to the violation of these rights such as ‘the right of everyone to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications’ (Article 15) and ‘the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health’ (Article 12) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.4 The General Comment No. 25 makes special reference to the difficulties arising from the scheduling of substances within the international drug control framework, which is considered to hinder scientific research. It highlights the fact that ‘some of these classifications were made with insufficient scientific support to substantiate those classifications, as credible evidence exists regarding the medical uses of a number of them, such as cannabis for the treatment of certain epilepsies’ (Par. 68). In this context, the Committee considers that decisions regarding the scheduling of substances should be reviewed on a regular basis, and that states should balance their drug control obligations with respect to, and fulfilment of the right to participate in and enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications. It also reaffirms that any limitation on research with controlled substances must meet the requirements of Article 4 of the Covenant—that is, it must be ‘determined by law only in so far as this may be compatible with the nature of these rights and solely for the purpose of promoting the general welfare in a democratic society’. It is a reminder that the commitments derived from the international human 4 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, G.A. Res. 2200A (XXI) (1966).

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rights treaties are fully applicable in the context of drug control. This should include people who use drugs, people involved in illicit drug markets, people who conduct research on/with controlled substances and people who may benefit from the findings of such research. The list is extensive, especially if we take into account, as the Comment does, that these are substances with potential health benefits (see par. 68). The commitments derived from the international human rights treaties fully apply, likewise, in the context of the ‘science of substance evaluation’ (see below). All in all, it can be inferred from the Comment that adopting decisions determining the level of control not based on the most recent available research results can compromise the enjoyment and full exercise of these rights recognised internationally.5 The relationship between science, knowledge and human rights goes of course beyond drug policy. In par. 54 of the Comment, the Committee accentuates that policy decisions should be based on the best available scientific evidence. Science should also be the result of ‘vigorous and informed democratic debate on the production and use of scientific knowledge, and a dialogue between the scientific community and society’. Such suggestion of the Committee, a UN body, can therefore be interpreted as an invitation to open a discussion around the ways in which knowledge in drug control is obtained and to adopt a more inclusive perspective regarding the actors considered legitimate to generating such knowledge aimed to inform drug policy. The International Guidelines on Human Rights and Drug Policy (UNDP 2019) shed some more light on this issue. The Guidelines aim to provide a set of clear, shared standards for states to define and implement drug control policies that maximise human rights protections. The ‘right to benefit from scientific progress and its applications’ has a place in this document too, which affirms that this right also applies in the context of ‘drug use and dependence, as well as in development and criminal 5 Multiple research works and national case law development highlight how constitutional principles and fundamental rights at the national level can be weakened in a similar way, as Walsh (2016: 80) illustrated for the case of psychedelics and the fundamental right to cognitive liberty, ‘a crucial component of freedom of thought, as enshrined within Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights’. Also, in 2014 the Supreme Court of Mexico ruled that the ‘system of prohibitions related to the self-consumption of marijuana affect the prima facie content of the human right to the free development of the personality’ recognised by the Mexican Constitution (Suprema Corte de Justicia 2020).

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justice responses to the illicit drug trade’ (UNDP 2019: 10). In other words, if this right is to be fully enjoyed, the available knowledge and the results of field research should be the elements that inform political decision-making, including policies aimed to reduce the harms associated with illicit markets, criminal sanctions or the connections between illicit drugs and social justice. In the context of the enjoyment of the right to benefit from scientific progress, the Guidelines make three basic recommendations. First, states should ensure that scientific research, including research on controlled drugs, can be conducted and communicated without censorship or interference. Often this censorship turns out to be self-censorship, with interference occurring not directly but in a structural way—privileging one type of knowledge, or expert profiles, and excluding others in the informal and relational processes of selecting expert profiles (see above; Stevens 2021). In addition, states should take measures to ensure that scientific knowledge and technologies and their applications are available to those who may need them. While specific reference is made to medical or palliative treatment for people who use drugs, or have a health condition related to their use, more broadly applied this requirement implies that other areas of drug policy should also be based on the most recent available evidence. Interventions in criminal policy, law enforcement, social justice and even market regulation, according to this interpretation of the Guidelines, should also be based on the latest available knowledge. There is now substantial evidence that suggests, for example, that it is more cost-effective to intervene in reducing the harms associated with illicit markets than merely to reduce their size. Finally, the Guidelines acknowledge that governments should consider revising the drug control schedules of the 1961 and 1971 Conventions, taking into account the latest research as well as the WHO recommendations. Both the Commentary and the Guidelines stress the need for a production of knowledge free of censorship and interference by public authorities, one that is available to make best political decisions and to increase the well-being of communities and individuals; and for the periodic review of the conclusions and decisions arising from this knowledge. The fact that both documents have been produced within the UN system, albeit with the broad participation of civil society, is noteworthy. How can these critical interventions be explained regarding the knowledge stimulating the operation of the drug control apparatus? Both the Commentary and (more frequently) the Guidelines have been used by

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various governments and civil society organisations to support actions and calls for international (and national) drug policy reform. If these documents demonstrate something, it is the existence of multiple controversies between the practice and the narrative in drug control. The emergence of these critical perspectives coming from the inside of the UN ‘ecosystem’ is due to several causes. One is the exhaustion of the control model based on punitive prohibition, as well as the narrow margins of flexibility that the international drug control regime allows for the states to adapt their drug policy according to their particular needs and situations. The existence of discordant positions is, in turn, a reflection of the lack of coherence and coordination in drug control matters between the different agencies and organisations, and especially the traditional disconnection between UN drug control bodies and human rights bodies (which in international jargon it has been called ‘the disconnection between Vienna and Geneva’). Several strategic documents have tried to highlight and alleviate this lack of coherence—one example is the United Nations System Common Position Supporting the Implementation of the International Drug Control Policy through Effective Inter-Agency Collaboration (CEB 2019). Recognising that UN drug strategy is notoriously fragmented and contradictory, the Common position offers some antidotes—in the field of scientific knowledge production, it appeals to ‘making best use of the expertise’ within the UN and ‘to provid[ing] Member States with the evidence base necessary to make informed policy decisions and to better understand the risks and benefits of new approaches to drug control, including those relating to cannabis’ (CEB 2019: 14). As noted in the theoretical introduction of this chapter, it is precisely in the controversies where the underlying rationalities of an established practice surface. In recent times such controversies have multiplied in the field of drug policy. The existence of contradictory narratives and practices is not unique to the UN system. In the United States, more than twenty states have regulated the recreational cannabis markets, while cannabis continues to be a Schedule I substance—and this, among other things, poses numerous barriers to research on its therapeutic potential. Likewise, within the EU this same ‘rising controversy’ is being observed in the common market. In December 2021, Malta regulated some access pathways to cannabis for adult use, such as home cultivation and cannabis users’ associations. But the real controversy will arise if Germany—the largest EU economy—implements its plans to regulate cannabis markets,

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foreseeably in a markedly neoliberal framework (see also last chapter for the discussion of this proposal in the Czech Republic). In addition to applicable international law, the EU law too raises certain barriers in this respect, as the recent debate around Council Framework Decision 2004/ 757/JHA (Council of the EU 2004) has shown (Jelsma 2022).

3.4 The Role of Knowledge and Evidence in the International Scheduling of Substances Let us focus in more detail on the Guidelines ’ recommendation that governments revise international Schedules according to the most recent available evidence. The paradox of evidence-based drug policy explained above can be clearly observed in the mechanism of scheduling established by the international drug control regime—‘the classification of a substance within a graded system of controls and restrictions, or “schedules”’ (Hallam et al. 2014). Inclusion of a given substance—whether it is a plant, a derivative of a natural product or a synthetic drug—in a certain schedule is a switcher for the application of a set of control and criminalisation measures with material impacts on the practice of users, market agents and national agencies. This is why this procedure—how a substance comes to be included in a schedule—becomes particularly sensitive and controversial. Scheduling can also take place at the national level, generally aiming to oversee a substance that is not under international control. An illustration of this is the recent scheduling of ayahuasca, and the plants used in this Amazonian decoction, in Italy in March 2022 (Ministero della Salute, Decreto 23 febbraio 2022). In both national and international scheduling of substances scientific evidence, and the hierarchy thereof, plays a role, aside from other political considerations (Hallam et al. 2014). Moreover, while the diversity of controlled substances is immense, similar control measures are adopted for substances very distinct from each other and that do not respond to the same chemical composition or effects on the organism, patterns and contexts of use, or market dynamics. In that respect, schedules as indexes that reduce complexity in ostensibly technocratic and scientifically neutral, but in fact demonstrably political ways to make it calculable and governable are extensions of the political technology of numbers referred to earlier. Indeed, the UN international drug control conventions grant a role to knowledge and evidence in the scheduling process. The text of both the

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1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances contain provisions articulating the procedure of placing new substances under control or changing the level of existing controls, and the role of the different drug control agencies in the process. In particular, the World Health Organization (WHO) and, within it, the Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (ECDD), are conferred a specific function. The treaties define a specific process for the scheduling of substances detailed in Articles 2 and 3 of the 1961 Single Convention, and Articles 2 and 3 of the 1971 Convention. In the case of both narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances, the WHO may provide information or data that in its opinion may require the control of a substance or the modification of any of the control schedules in which they are placed. The ECDD has come to name this compilation of information, prior to the scheduling decision, the ‘science of substance evaluation’.6 This Committee, as its website explains, ‘consists of an independent group of experts in the field of drugs and medicines’.7 The criteria applied to evaluate the health risks and benefits of the use of psychoactive substances, and accordingly to issue ECDD recommendations to the international community, are mainly three—evidence of dependence potential, actual abuse or evidence of likelihood of abuse, and therapeutic applications of the substance. However, following the ‘science of substance evaluation’, the final decision regarding which substances are subjected to control and in which schedule they are placed is taken by the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND)—the pivotal diplomatic and political body of the international drug control system. The scheduling process thus concludes with a political decision, even if the discussions are based on the WHO recommendations. Therefore, while science (with its inherently but concealed operation of power producing, among other, certain hierarchies of evidence) has a function in the process, the final decision is eminently political and sovereign, the technocratic facet of the process notwithstanding. The operation of power and the effect of hierarchies is reinforced also by the manner in which the decisions are passed in the CND. While most decisions here are taken by consensus (e.g. the 6 See the WHO’s Expert Committee on Drug Dependence website at https://www. who.int/groups/who-expert-committee-on-drug-dependence/about. 7 See the WHO’s Expert Committee on Drug Dependence website at https://www. who.int/groups/who-expert-committee-on-drug-dependence.

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adoption of resolutions on a wide variety of issues related to controlled drugs), the ruling on the scheduling of substances are taken by a majority vote—cast by show of hands during the sessions held in Vienna UN headquarters—by the 53 members of the Commission at a given period.8 So, despite the provisions of the conventions, substance scheduling has been more political, following a sovereignist mentality of government, than scientific or technocratical in nature. This tendency to establish hierarchical categories based on political considerations can be traced to the beginnings of the international control system. It has become more visible since plants that are sources of narcotic drugs were placed under control in the 1961 Single Convention. For example, the evidence used to schedule coca leaf was based on the ‘Report of the Commission of Enquiry on the Coca Leaf’ issued in 1950 (ECOSOC 1950). The report is an outstanding example of a scientific bias discussed earlier—it contains innumerable assertions based on the prejudices, lack of knowledge and contempt of its authors towards the indigenous populations of the Andes and non-Western traditions. The deeply biased and racist considerations included in the report would hardly meet not only scientific norms but also the current standards of international human rights law or the rights of indigenous peoples. To give just one example, from the beginning the report characterises coca leaf chewing as a ‘vice’, which it blames for the poor living conditions of the ‘Indians’, and identifies as the main impediment for ‘the most disadvantaged groups to reach a higher standard of living’ (ECOSOC 1950). The report is a typical product of neocolonial knowledge production. Yet it continues to constitute the bulk of ‘evidence’ on which the decision to include the coca leaf in Schedule I of the Single Convention was based. The political effects of this scheduling are significant—the prevailing control and criminalisation of coca leaf reverberates in the lives of many people, notably for the Andean diaspora who moves to other regions and wants to maintain the traditional practices of chewing coca or drinking coca tea (Sánchez-Avilés and Langlois 2017; Metaal et al. 2019; Bouso et al. 2022). The role of evidence was similarly distorted in the case of cannabis control, a subject we develop further in the next section. Cannabis was brought to the deliberations at the early stages of the international drug 8 See the membership of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs as for 1 January 2022 at https://www.unodc.org/documents/commissions/CND/Membership/MEM BERS_OF_THE_COMMISSION_ON_NARCOTIC_DRUGS_1_January_2022.pdf.

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control system in 1925, and was included in the strictest control scheme of the 1961 Single Convention. Interestingly, as Room et al. (2010: 7) explain, the fundamental decision on the status of cannabis was taken before the global popularisation of its recreational use. Cannabis was placed in Schedule I and Schedule IV of the Single Convention, with the latter reserved for substances considered to betray a high risk of abuse and little or no therapeutic potential, thus ‘confirming’ the plant had no medical properties. The process of evaluating the available ‘evidence’ on the effects of cannabis was certainly controversial, as analysed in detail by Bewley-Taylor, Blickman and Jelsma (2014, 24 and ff.). Most evidence was submitted in reports with a clear bias such as Wolff’s ‘The Physical and Mental Effects of Cannabis’ (WHO 1955) which did not follow standard scientific procedures and even sowed confusion between the positions of certain states, diplomats and ‘experts’, and the positions of the WHO itself (Bewley-Taylor et al. 2014). The control of this widely used plant, strongly pushed by the U.S. at the time, rather relied on considerations of other kinds—namely geopolitical, economic and moral (Andreas and Nadelmann 2006; BewleyTaylor 1999). The status of cannabis international prohibition remained unchanged until the review process that culminated in December 2020 with its rescheduling. As discussed in the following section, this reclassification process had a scientific dimension; but in another display of the complex entanglement with other domains, it also involved political, diplomatic and even market and symbolic considerations.

3.5

The ‘Cannabis Controversy’: International Rescheduling and the Challenges of Evidenced-Based Drug Policy

Cannabis is the most widely consumed controlled substance in the world, as the World Drug Reports have documented over years (UNODC, successive years). Its prohibition is one of the cornerstones on which the entire architecture of the international drug control system rests, and the basis of the control machinery that sustains the political rationality of prohibitionism in most parts of the globe—national data available in multiple countries shows that the vast majority of reported drug-related detentions and administrative reports are cannabis-related. (In 2020 in Spain, for example, they accounted for 60% and 74% respectively,

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according to official data from OEDA 2021). Room et al. (2010: 9) affirm the fundamental role of cannabis in the drug control as ‘without cannabis, the totals [of drugs markets estimates] would suggest that illegal drug use is not a global population issue’. This makes any policy changes introduced in relation to cannabis particularly challenging: questioning the place of cannabis in the prohibition system is not possible without its entire structure ‘shaking’. Moreover, cannabis is leading the implementation of alternative models to the criminalisation of drugs. Multiple jurisdictions have already regulated recreational cannabis markets for adult use: Canada, Uruguay, numerous U.S. states and, recently, Malta—the first EU country to take such a step (Farrugia 2021), with Germany, as noted above, taking steps in this direction along with others including the Czech Republic. In parallel, many countries have adopted programmes to provide access to cannabis for medical use, even in countries with very restrictive drug policies and with a track record of human rights violations against drug users, or in the name of drug control. The examples include Mexico and Colombia, which have advanced their legalisation processes while still facing severe challenges in the field of drug control. The reasons behind these changes in national cannabis policies are multiple and profound. We will highlight two of them here. First, the change responds to a more or less open acknowledgement by many governments that punitive policies—despite their high cost in terms of public resources and human rights violations—have not worked as a tool to reduce the size of markets or to improve public health. In addition, in the case of cannabis, the large amount of resources invested in its control is no longer considered expedient for a substance whose use is widespread and normalised in much of the world—and for which scientific evidence suggests it does not entail a ‘danger’ for public health (Hidalgo et al. 2023). This slow but robust change of focus is making headway in many parts of the globe, and is supported by a multitude of civil organisations and academics, which have produced the bulk of the knowledge and evaluations that have led to these conclusions. The ‘democratisation’ of knowledge and the ability to exchange experiences and information between networks of users, growers, doctors, researchers, people who use cannabis for therapeutic purposes have been crucial in paving the way for a paradigm shift and for shaking (somewhat) the hierarchy of evidence that supports drug prohibition. Second, the change is related to the question of who benefits from prohibition, and who benefits from regulation. If those social groups

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that benefit/have benefited the most from cannabis prohibition (and drug control in general) begin to see benefits in regulation as well, it is easier for change to gain political traction. The lucrative recreational cannabis market and the opportunities that certain political and economic elites have identified have been key to tipping the balance in many contexts. Private actors (i.e. the cannabis industry, pharmaceutical companies) together with government agencies in charge of issuing licences and permits are emerging as the new repositories of social and political control of supply. In other words, they determine how, for whom and under which conditions the access to cannabis market is feasible, and the place each stakeholder occupies—for example, if priority is given to social or self-managed access for cannabis users, or to commercial supply controlled by large corporations. In this new balance of beneficiaries, the production of knowledge can also be transformed to legitimise certain political and market options. This way, a new hierarchy of evidence could emerge, fuelled by public and private funds, scientific legitimacy, and privileged positions in public space. In practice, the arguments brought up to support the decision to regulate cannabis markets have not been uniform. This is a particularly sensitive issue, especially in relation to compliance with the international drug control conventions (Jelsma et al. 2018). In the well-known cases of Uruguay, Canada and Malta, the reasons given were different—related to human rights considerations, the protection of minors, or the priority of harm and risk reduction. Needless to say, the international drug control regime has not been immune to these ‘telluric movements’ at the national level. In fact, the process around relaxing the prohibitionist stance (or not) at the international level in relation to cannabis—that could be termed the ‘cannabis controversy’—has highlighted the difficulties of incorporating scientific evidence and knowledge into political decisions, as well as the sensitivity of introducing changes in the extent of cannabis control. The scientific process that facilitated the rescheduling of cannabis at the UN level culminated in December 2020, and its political implications, have been thoroughly analysed from multiple angles (Walsh et al. 2019; Putri 2020; Jelsma 2020; Riboulet-Zemouli and Krawit 2022). In June 2018, the WHO Expert Committee on Drug Dependence conducted a pre-review of cannabis and cannabis-related substances subject to international control. It was the first time this Committee evaluated the suitability of cannabis scheduling within the international drug control

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conventions. Despite being the most widely used controlled substance, the ECDD had never conducted a formal pre-review or a critical review of cannabis until that time,9 although member states had requested so already back in 2009.10 As pointed out above, the process to include cannabis in Schedules I and IV of the Single Convention did not respond to an exhaustive and objective analysis of the evidence available at that time (Bewley-Taylor et al. 2014). It is plausible to assume that the same causes in terms of cultural prejudices and political considerations that made cannabis scheduled so in the first instance also explain why the WHO did not carry out this reconsideration until so long after. This initial evaluation (pre-review) led to the next step in the assessment process (critical review). In January 2019 the Report of the 41st Expert Committee on Drug Dependence was published, containing the core of the critical review of cannabis and cannabis-related substances (WHO ECDD 2019). A set of recommendations was sent to the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) for deliberation and vote (WHO 2019). The bulk of these recommendations included—in brief—the deletion of cannabis and cannabis resin from Schedule IV of the 1961 Single Convention (Recommendation 5.1); rescheduling the main psychoactive components of cannabis, dronabinol/Δ9-THC and tetrahydrocannabinol, removing them from Schedules I and II of the 1971 Convention and incorporating them into Schedule I of the Single Convention (Recommendations 5.2 and 5.3.); deleting extracts and tinctures of cannabis form Schedule I of the Single Convention (Recommendation 5.4); or adding a footnote to Schedule I of the Single Convention stating ‘preparations containing predominantly cannabidiol [CBD] and 9 As explained at the WHO’s website: ‘A pre-review is the first step of the ECDD’s assessment process, where it is determined whether there is enough robust scientific information to proceed to the next step, called a critical review. This initial evaluation is also an opportunity to identify gaps in the available scientific data. A critical review is carried out when there is sufficient scientific evidence to allow the ECDD to make an informed recommendation that the substance be placed under international control, or if its level of control should be changed’. See WHO’ webpage at https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/who-expertcommittee-on-drug-dependence-review-of-cannabis. 10 For details see WHO’s website at https://www.who.int/teams/health-product-andpolicy-standards/controlled-substances/who-review-of-cannabis-and-cannabis-related-sub stances and WHO Resolution 52/5: Exploration of all aspects related to the use of cannabis seeds for illicit purposes, at https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/CNDRes-52-5.

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not more than 0.2 per cent of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol are not under international control’ (Recommendation 5.5). As a precedent to this last recommendation, the WHO had recommended that ‘preparations considered to be pure cannabidiol should not be scheduled within the international drug control conventions’ (WHO ECDD 2019). Finally, another important decision contained in the ECDD’s report—although not formulated as a recommendation on which a vote should be taken— is that cannabis remained at Schedule I of the Single Convention. This decision has been the most contested by the stakeholders involved in the process (IDPC 2020; Drug Reporter 2020), as it does not seem to be consistent with the rest of the recommendations, neither sufficiently based on evidence (Jelsma 2020). Indeed, the arguments used by ECDD to support this proposition (such as cannabis being a substance ‘used on a large scale’) (WHO ECDD 2019) do not seem to have the same robustness as others. Once the evidence was presented and elaborated into concrete recommendations, knowledge passes the baton to politics. (As noted earlier, WHO and the ECDD act as providers of the scientific evidence that inform ‘sovereign’ political decisions regarding the international control of substances, but do not substitute them.) The vote on these recommendations was preceded by numerous deliberation sessions within the CND. The sensitivity of the issue, and the dissent among the international community with regard to the scope of cannabis control, caused the vote to be postponed two times. The implications of Recommendation 5.1 were the main cause of concern of those governments most sceptical of the cannabis policy reform. Such concern could be related more to granting symbolic legitimacy to the medicinal uses of cannabis— and, therefore, to providing legitimacy to the scientific evidence and knowledge that supports this recommendation—than to implementing immediate political shifts. The withdrawal of cannabis from Schedule IV of the Single Convention implies the recognition by the UN drug control system that cannabis has medicinal properties. But, per se, it does not oblige states to regulate medical cannabis at the national level. Rather, what is recognised by the ECDD is that there is sufficient knowledge— that is, scientific evidence—showing that cannabis has specific therapeutic advantages (WHO ECDD 2019). In spite of this, by December 2020 almost half of the CND members opposed approving this recommendation in what was perhaps the Commission’s most delicate voting process in recent years. This outcome relates to the paradox of evidence-based

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drug policy introduced earlier. Indeed, WHO’s critical review and the recommendations provided by the ECDD, on which the states were informed and based their vote, were identical. However, the interpretation of the policy decision to be taken on the basis of this evidence was quite the opposite. Thus, the knowledge controversy gave way to the political controversy. The final deliberations and subsequent voting took place in December 2020. The result was in favour of following Recommendation 5.1— that is, removing cannabis from Schedule IV of the 1961 Convention. There were 27 votes in favour, 25 against and one abstention (Ukraine) (Riboulet-Zemouli 2020). A previous analysis by one of us (Sánchez Avilés 2020, 2021) concluded that the choice to vote for or against cannabis rescheduling was an outcome of different motivations—and various reasons underlined the support of either position. States where cannabis is traditionally cultivated, such as Morocco, India, Jamaica and South Africa, voted in favour. Also in favour were the states where regulated markets for recreational cannabis exist, such as Canada and Uruguay. The European Union, whose member states that are also part of the CND coordinate the direction of their votes (Riboulet-Zemouli 2020), also voted in favour of reclassification, although Hungary dissociated itself from this position and ended up voting against. The U.S., Mexico and Colombia also voted in favour. This is a heterogeneous group of states whose positions can be explained by motivations of various kinds—not always justified on the basis of the available scientific evidence. Equally heterogeneous was the group of countries that stood against following the WHO’s Recommendation 5.1. Led by China and, especially, by Russia, these states shared their firm opposition to loosening international controls on cannabis, or to any step away from the most restrictive interpretation of the international conventions. These states are mostly found in Africa and Asia, and include Japan, Iran or Egypt. According to different statements made at CND sessions (CND 2020), this group based their positions on procedural, but also scientific arguments. On one hand, these states claimed that the division of competencies and collaboration between the CND and the WHO should be better defined. But they also argued that scientific evidence is not yet strong enough to pave the way for the regulation of the medicinal use of cannabis (CND Blog 2020), an argument that was widely used when requesting the deferral of the vote. Again, the political controversy connects with the controversy in

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interpreting the available knowledge and considering it (or not) as sufficient. The paradoxical point is that both sides in the political controversy used science (among others) to support their positions.

3.6

Conclusion

Knowledge does not simply describe the natural world. It coproduces it. Knowledge production does not unreel in separation from politics— knowledge and power are mutually constitutive. The case of drug control confirms this premise, with the relationship of the two unpacked in this chapter. To create a field of visibility where policy interventions can be directed, a certain knowledge formation must be established to define and delimit the problem—and so to allow emergence and stabilisation of new objects, as observed in the cannabis rescheduling process traced in the last section. In line with Jasanoff’s (2004) insights, it moreover has a reproductive function in terms of intelligibility and portability—even when, as was the case with coca leaf discussed above, at the origin of the problematisation was ‘science’ that in fact was a neocolonial knowledge, procedurally and ethically controversial. The status quo function of the officially sanctioned drug science, sustained by governmental funding and playing a reproductive role in maintaining the prohibitionist rationality at the heart of the international drug control regime stems from patterned, cultural practice from which certain hierarchy of evidence emerges, including by means of deferral rituals in which certain claims are not considered valid yet (because ‘sufficient’ evidence has not yet been submitted) and the internally inconsistent paradigm of ‘evidence-based policy’. The latter gives the impression of impassionate, neutral knowledge production conforming to the standards of scientific inquiry which then serves as a basis for similarly dispassionate policy making. But in practice, its conditions of possibility are, by and large, determined by a certain constellation of forces, to whose reproduction it contributes through its disciplining function delineating the boundaries of what passes for acceptable, legitimate knowledge. However, the operation of this knowledge machine is not free of controversies that challenge those very established boundaries. (In some cases, as discussed in the last chapter, the ‘evidence-based approach’ can even be used to support notionally apolitical, but effectively political arguments against sovereign power by strong technocratic agents.) The cannabis controversy explored above illustrates the complex placement of scientific evidence in political decision-making

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processes. The paradox of evidence-based approach is certainly not limited to the field of drug policy. It is certain, on the other hand, that the more a policy issue is traversed by cultural, colonial and historical a priori and biases, the more challenging the incorporation of critical knowledge will be. The implications of this are not only symbolic or theoretical. They have a very clear and tangible impact on the lives of the individuals and communities affected by these policies. To these lives, we turn attention to the next chapter.

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Lancaster, Kari, Karen Duke, and Alison Ritter. 2015. Producing the ‘Problem of Drugs’: A Cross-National Examination of ‘Recovery’ Discourse in Two Australian dn British Reports. International Journal of Drug Policy 26 (7): 617–625. Lancaster, Kari, Carla Treloar, and Alison. 2017. Naloxone Works’: The Politics of Knowledge in ‘Evidence-Based. Drug Policy. Health 21 (3): 278–294. Latour, Bruno. 2018. Down to Earth. London: Polity Press. Metaal, Pien, Constanza Sánchez-Avilés, and Natalia Rebollo. 2019. Migrants and Traditional Use: The Coca Leaf Travels from the Andean Amazon to the European Courts. ICEERS’ Blog post (30 May). Available at: https://www.iceers.org/migrants-and-traditional-use-the-coca-leaf-travelsfrom-the-andean-amazon-to-the-european-courts-2/. Ministerio della Salute. Decreto 23 febbraio 2022. Aggiornamento delle tabelle contenenti l’indicazione delle sostanze stupefacenti e psicotrope, di cui al decreto del Presidente della Repubblica 9 ottobre 1990, n. 309 e successive modificazioni e integrazioni. Inserimento nella tabella I delle piante Banisteriopsis caapi, Psychotria viridis, di Ayahuasca, estratto, macinato, polvere, e delle sostanze armalina e armina. (22A01608) (GU Serie Generale n.61 del 14–03– 2022). Available at: https://www.gazzettaufficiale.it/eli/id/2022/03/14/ 22A01608/sg. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press. Monaghan, Mark, Emma Wincup, and Kate Wicker. 2018. Experts, Expertise and Drug Policymaking. The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice 57 (3): 422–441. Moore, David. 2011. The Ontological Politics of Knowledge Production: Qualitative Research in the Multidisciplinary Drug Field, In The Drug Effect: Health, Crime and Society, eds. Suzanne Fraser and David Moore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neale, Joanne, et al. 2017. Why we Should Conduct Research in Collaboration with People who use Alcohol and Other Drugs. Addiction 112 (12): 2084– 2085. Observatorio Español de las Drogas y las Adicciones (OEDA). Informe 2021. Alcohol, tabaco y drogas ilegales en España. Madrid: Ministerio de Sanidad. Delegación del Gobierno para el Plan Nacional sobre Drogas. Putri, Dania. 2020. Cannabis Rescheduling: A Global Introduction. IDPC/ TNI Briefing Paper. Available at: https://www.tni.org/files/publication-dow nloads/cannabis_rescheduling_global_intro_0.pdf. Reviejo, Santiago F. 2022. Médicos y expertos forman una subcomisión ‘paralela’ a la del Congreso sobre regulación del cannabis en desacuerdo con sus trabajos. Público (11 April). Available at: https://www.publico.es/soc iedad/medicos-expertos-forman-subcomision-paralela-congreso-regulacioncannabis-desacuerdo-trabajos.html.

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Riboulet-Zemouli, Kenzi. 2020. CND Monitor 7.III.2020. 63rd Commission on Narcotic Drugs of the United Nations. Monitoring countries positions on cannabis scheduling votes. Available at: https://kenzi.zemou.li/cndmon itor/. Riboulet-Zemouli, Kenzi, and M.A. Krawit. 2022. WHO’s First Scientific Review of Medicinal Cannabis: From Global Struggle to Patient Implications. Drugs, Habits and Social Policy 1 (23): 5–21. Rivera-Aguirre, Ariadne, et al. 2022. Does Recreational Cannabis Legalization Change Cannabis Use Patterns? Evidence from Secondary School Students in Uruguay. Addiction 117 (11): 2866–2877. Room, Robin et al. 2010. Cannabis Policy. Moving Beyond Stalemate. Oxford: Oxford University Press and Beckley Foundation Press. Rose, Nicholas. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sánchez-Avilés, Constanza. 2020. Recientes desarrollos en la política internacional de drogas. Reflexiones en torno a la 63a sesión de la Comisión de Estupefacientes de las Naciones Unidas. Ensayos para un nuevo paradigma en la política de drogas. Coord. Conde, Elena. ICEI Occasional Papers. Sánchez Avilés, Constanza. 2021. La reclasificación del cannabis: Otra vuelta de tuerca. lasdrogas.info. Available at https://www.lasdrogas.info/opiniones/lareclasificacion-del-cannabis-otra-vuelta-de-tuerca/. Sanchéz Avilés, Constanza, and Ondrej Ditrych. 2020. The Evolution of International Drug Control under the United Nations, In Research Handbook on International Drug Policy, eds. David Bewley-Taylor and Khalid Tinasti. London: Edward Elgar. Sánchez Avilés, Constanza, and Andrea Langlois. 2017. A Small Case in Spain is a Big Victory for Smarter Drug Policy. OSF Voices (4 May). Available at: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/small-case-spain-big-vic tory-smarter-drug-policy. Stevens, Alex. 2020. Critical Realism and the ‘Ontological Politics of Drug Policy’. International Journal of Drug Policy 84. Stevens, Alex. 2021. The Politics of Being an ‘Expert’: A Critical Realist Auto-Ethnography of Drug Policy Advisory Panels in the UK. Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice & Criminology 10 (2). Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación. 2020. Extracto del Amparo en Revisión 237/2014. Dirección General de Derechos Humanos, México. Available at: https://www.scjn.gob.mx/derechos-humanos/sites/default/files/sentenciasemblematicas/resumen/2020-12/Resumen%20AR237-2014%20DGDH.pdf. UN system coordination Task Team on the Implementation of the UN System Common Position on drug-related matters. 2019. What we have learned over the last ten years: A summary of knowledge acquired and produced by the UN system on drug-related matters. Conference room paper submitted

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by the Secretary-General. Commission on Narcotic Drugs. E/CN.7/2019/ CRP.10. Available at: https://www.unodc.org/documents/commissions/ CND/2019/Contributions/UN_Entities/What_we_have_learned_over_the_ last_ten_years_-_14_March_2019_-_w_signature.pdf. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, World Health Organization, and International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy. 2019. International Guidelines on Human Rights and Drug Policy. Available at: https://www.undp.org/pub lications/international-guidelines-human-rights-and-drug-policy. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Successive years. World Drug Report. Available at: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-ana lysis/wdr-2021---previous-reports.html. Vitellone, Nicole. 2017. Social Science of the Syringe: A Sociology of Injecting Drug Use. London: Routledge. Walker, Ingrid, and Julie Netherland. 2019. Developing a Transformative Drug Policy Research Agenda in the United States. Contemporary Drug Problems 46 (1): 3–21. Walsh, Charlotte. 2016. Psychedelics and Cognitive Liberty: Reimagining Drug Policy Through the Prism of Human Rights. International Journal of Drug Policy 29: 80–87. Walsh, John et al. 2019. The WHO’s First-Ever Critical Review of Cannabis: A Mixture of Obvious Recommendations Deserving Support and Dubious Methods and Outcomes Requiring Scrutiny. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute. Available at: https://www.tni.org/files/publication-downloads/whocannabis-wola_tni_gdpo-march_2019.pdf. Weber, Cynthia. 2014. International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction, 4th ed. London: Routledge. WHO Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (ECDD). 2019. 41st Report (Cannabis and cannabis-related substances). Geneva: WHO. Available at: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/325073/978 9241210270-eng.pdf. World Health Organization (WHO). 1955. The Physical and Mental Effects of Cannabis. Additional Study. WHO/APD/56 and E/CN.7/L.916 (1955). Prepared, on request of WHO, by Dr. P. O. Wolff. Available at: https:// www.tni.org/files/the-problem-of-cannabis-who-wolff.pdf. World Health Organization (WHO). 2019. Letter sent by Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the WHO to Mr. António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations. Geneva: United Nations. Available at: https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/controlled-substa nces/unsg-letter-ecdd41-recommendations-cannabis-24jan19.pdf?sfvrsn=607 0292c_2&download=true.

CHAPTER 4

Migrants, Substances and Borders: The Case of the Spanish Southern Border

Abstract This chapter explores a particular border space—Campo de Gibraltar in South Spain—from the biopolitical perspective, mapping the operation of the drug and migrant control dispositif and diagnosing the operation of different forms of power in it. The governmental representational practices of the ‘problem’ localised in this space and rationalities and technologies to manage it are traced. The chapter then shows how through the securitisation narratives related to drugs, important elements of the local reality—and voices that could mediate it—are taken out of the picture and explores the political effects of narrowing the field of vision enacted by these representational practices supported also by a broader cultural production. Finally, the space is narrated as a narcofrontier and (narco-)borderscape, focusing on productive functions of such heterotopias (e.g. purification) that, as in the case of Campo de Gibraltar, need not be located in the Global South but also internal peripheries of Europe. Keywords Campo de Gibraltar · (Narco)border · Necropolitics · Drug traffic · Securitization · Drug enforcement

Drug control has traditionally been linked to, and functioned in relation to the control of other flows by the state, including migration. This foregrounds the importance of the border spaces that can have various © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 O. Ditrych and C. Sánchez Avilés, Governing Human Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43552-2_4

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materialities—from the customs at the airport to walls and fences—with different surrounding apparatuses of surveillance and control, through which the state performs its twin internalisation and externalisation function in seeking to police the global neoliberal economy. In this chapter, we explore one particular border space—Campo de Gibraltar in South Spain—from the critical biopolitical perspective, mapping the operation of the drug and migrant control dispositif and diagnosing the operation of different forms of power in it. First, we set the stage for the analysis. Second, we describe the governmental representational practices of the ‘problem’ that is localised in this space, and rationalities and technologies to manage it. Third, we show how, through the securitisation narratives related to drugs, important elements of the local reality—and voices that could mediate it—are taken out of the picture and explore the political effects of narrowing the field of vision enacted by these representational practices supported also by a broader cultural production. Fourth, we narrate this space as a narcofrontier and (narco-)borderscape, focusing on productive functions of such heterotopias (e.g. purification) that, as the case of Campo de Gibraltar, need not be located in the Global South but also internal peripheries of Europe. We identify here an aporia as in this particular (narco-)border scape, the drug control dispositif that is generally concerned with life of the population is centred, due to enrolling elements of the more conventional liberal security dispositif, on the control of inert things. This has, however, significant biopolitical effects since it reinforces the construction of the border as a zone of exception and invites engagement with Achile Mbembe’s (2003) notion of ‘necropower’.

4.1

Drug Trafficking Dynamics in South Spain

The notion of ‘Spanish Southern border’ generally refers to the border area between Morocco and Spain, which in turn coincides with the borders between Morocco and the EU. In that same space the enclave of Gibraltar is also located, which since Brexit has come to constitute another EU border. As Ferrer-Gallardo explains (2008: 303), this is essentially a maritime border encompassing the waters of the Strait of Gibraltar that separates the Iberian Peninsula from the African continent, the piece of Moroccan Atlantic coast that lies off the Canary Islands, and the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, which are also the only external land borders between the EU and Africa (Acosta 2014: 2).

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Multiple concentrated human rights violations take place in this space. Hundreds of people lose their lives every year on average here, trying to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa to the EU. This border area is furthermore a major geographical hub for illicit drug markets— a phenomenon most intensely concentrated in the region of Campo de Gibraltar. In terms of illicit drug markets dynamics, the ‘Southern border’ is susceptible to be conceived in broader sociological and geographical terms and include also the Spanish coastal territory, from the province of Huelva to the Region of Murcia. However, in this chapter, we focus in detail on the coasts of Andalusia, and specifically the region of Campo de Gibraltar as the place where most of the illicit trafficking activity crossing Spanish borders is concentrated. Several researchers speak of the consolidation of an international hub in this area (Noguera 2018), made up of eight municipalities (including Algeciras, Tarifa and La Línea de la Concepción) and approximately 273,000 inhabitants in 2021.1 In addition to geographic features, several structural factors converge in this region. Notably, endemic social exclusion, subordinate position in the global economy, and decades of lacking government investment. These are at the same time structural causes and consequences of the growth of criminal activities in the area: mainly the trafficking of hashish (cannabis resin) from Morocco to Spanish coasts, cocaine trafficking through the port of Algeciras, and tobacco smuggling—an illicit activity in the area with a long tradition (Noguera 2018). Human rights violations in the context of migration occurring in this border region are better documented than illicit drug markets dynamics and related harms. The NGO Caminando Fronteras (Walking Borders) calculated that in 2021 at least 4404 people lost their lives on the access routes to Spain. This figure could be much higher: estimates suggest only a minimal part of these disappearances are documented and 95% of the people disappear at sea without their bodies being recovered (Caminando Fronteras 2022). Multiple civil society organisations have also highlighted the impact of migration control policies and the harmful consequences of

1 Data for 2021, obtained at the Spanish National Institute of Statistics for the eight municipalities that conform Campo the Gibraltar: Algeciras, Los Barrios, La Línea de la Concepción, San Roque, Tarifa, Castellar de la Frontera, Jimena de la Frontera and San Martín del Tesorillo. see data provided at the section ‘Cádiz: Población por municipios y sexo’, available at: https://www.ine.es/jaxiT3/Tabla.htm?t=2864&L=0.

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the lack of coordination between the different authorities with competencies in this area, as well as the close link between border control agencies, the interests of the ‘migration control industry’ and public policy decisions (PorCausa 2021; Carril Zerpa et al. 2022; Rodríguez and Fanjul 2017).2 This lack of transparency and accountability naturally extends also to the context of drug control, where the securitisation of both the diagnosis of the phenomenon and the policy responses relegate issues such as human rights or social justice to the margins. Even if less documented, research accumulated over the last decade shows that Southern Spain continues to be an important geographical hub for illicit drug markets. In particular, it serves as a transport connection point between cannabis resin production areas in Morocco and European consumer markets and, more recently, for the introduction of cocaine from South America, often via the West African route (McDermott et al. 2021: 14–20; Europol 2021: 46–49). This is not a new phenomenon but rather a ramification of traditional smuggling networks—especially of tobacco—that exist in the area and which developed around the Gibraltar fence and the proximity of North Africa (Noguera 2018). The report The Cocaine Pipeline to Europe (McDermott et al. 2021) notes that Spain also continues to be one of the main entry and transit points for cocaine produced in Latin America that is destined for European consumer markets. Most of these seizures occur on boats, as well as in the ports of Algeciras, Barcelona and Valencia. It is estimated that 40–50% of all cocaine entering Spain enters through one of these three ports. Unlike in the 1980s and 1990s, cocaine trafficking routes are no longer concentrated in Galicia3 but pass through airports, ports, coasts and islands throughout Spain. New cocaine trafficking routes have opened, joining the traditional hashish trafficking lines from Morocco to the beaches of the Costa del Sol. In this context, the hashish infrastructure is used to transport cocaine entering through Africa. However, according to this report, Spain has been overtaken by Belgium as the main 2 PorCausa defines the ‘migration control industry’ as a ‘set of economic interactions between different actors with the objective of carrying out actions aimed at controlling migratory flows across borders’ (See Rodríguez and Fanjul 2017: 9). 3 Galicia and Campo de Gibraltar share some characteristics that partially explain why both territories are, or have been, important hubs for international drug trafficking operations (border areas, traditional smuggling activity, difficult-to-access coasts, relative neglect by the central government, as well as weak economies with structural social inequalities and deprivation).

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entry point for cocaine into Europe—which is now the port of Antwerp (McDermott et al. 2021: 20). Noguera’s analysis points out that in Campo de Gibraltar, there is a series of circumstances, both structural and circumstantial, that have favoured the entrenchment of certain illicit activities such as smuggling or drug trafficking. These include the geographical location, including a double border (Morocco and Gibraltar) and the presence of a large international communication hub—the port of Algeciras. In addition, the region suffers from a historical economic weakness, with expansive informal economy as well as legal activities susceptible to be used for money laundering, such as tourism, real state, hotels and restaurants. Likewise, there is a social tolerance towards drug trafficking, smuggling and corruption which hinders law enforcement and government plans to manage these phenomena (Noguera 2018: 14–20). Three important novelties seem to have been introduced into the traditional dynamics of these activities since the mid-2010s. First, the increase in cocaine transit, which involves a different structure to that of hashish trafficking but coexists in the same territory and reconfigures the state’s response, affecting also the logistics of trafficking hashish in the process (Europa Press 2018). Second, an increase in violence by criminal organisations, both among themselves and towards state security forces. The rescue of a trafficker in the Hospital of La Línea de la Concepción in February 2018, as well as the death of a local policeman in 2017 highlighted the erosion of what is locally called the ‘principle of authority’—i.e. a sort of Pax linense that had provided a certain order in the relations between traffickers and police forces (Cañas 2018a). Third, the area has been receiving more political and media attention with the launch of the Special Plan for Campo de Gibraltar in November 2018, involving ten ministries and with a budget of more than 900 million euros (Portal Presidencia Gobierno 2018). Media interest, and even Netflix series (Moraleda 2020), increase the focus on Southern Spain—yet generally without providing many clues about the structural causes of the phenomenon or the consequences for the communities, often stigmatised by the media and cultural production more broadly. However, the increase in violence, government investment and media attention has not been accompanied by rigorous academic analysis that would allow, on the one hand, to understand the structural causes of this situation and, on the other hand, to evaluate whether the policies being implemented, as well as their budget, are being effective and meet

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their stated objectives. The ramifications of the illicit drug markets radiate from Campo de Gibraltar to other areas of Southern Spain, where they combine with the presence of large cargo ports such as Algeciras, the rugged coasts in many parts of Andalusia, the infrastructure and transport logistics of the fruit and vegetable sector in Almeria and Murcia, the smuggling tradition and structures around Gibraltar, or the anonymity of the large tourist centres of the Costa del Sol (Ortega et al. 2021). In addition, the socioeconomic conditions of this region, particularly Campo de Gibraltar and the traditional neglect it has suffered from the government, may exacerbate the involvement of some sectors of the population in illicit activities. By way of illustration, in 2016, the study Population at risk of poverty in Spain town by town placed La Línea de la Concepción as the fourth poorest town in Spain, with 37.6% of its inhabitants living at risk of poverty (Ayuntamiento La Línea 2017).

4.2 Government Narratives and Policy Responses to Drug Trafficking in Southern Spain The diagnosis of drug trafficking dynamics in Campo de Gibraltar and the broader southern border has been at the core of a number of governmental documents. In particular, the Spanish government has focused on the impact of international drug trafficking activities carried out by the multiple criminal groups operating in the area. For example, the National Strategy against Organized Crime and Serious Crime 2019–2023, prepared by different governmental agencies and approved by the National Security Council, affirms that cocaine and hashish trafficking continue to be predominant activities of organised crime in Spain, along with the money laundering derived from them. The causes identified in the Strategy for the existence of this important illegal activity seem, in principle, beyond the control of any government: for example, ‘our geographical location’ or ‘cultural ties with the main producer countries’ (Ministerio de la Presidencia 2019: 23). An image of Spain is presented as a sort of ‘retaining wall’, a mere place of transit (especially for the hashish routes) towards the European consumer markets. The location and the role of Spain are described as ‘exceptional’—this can be interpreted as claiming that Spain is a main ‘drug receiver/transit’ country due to causes difficult to modify through governmental policies. Therefore, it is necessary to ‘promote specific plans’ (Ministerio de la Presidencia 2019: 39) to mitigate their effects.

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In addition to cocaine and hashish trafficking, the Strategy echoes the ‘alarm’ generated by the increase in cannabis cultivation and trafficking (Ministerio de la Presidencia 2019: 23). However, evidence seems to suggest that contrary to what the Strategy claims, that cannabis illicit markets do not have serious implications for national security: in general, violence is restricted to sporadic episodes between people belonging to criminal groups (Mossos d’Esquadra 2022) and most of the people who grow cannabis seem to do so for personal use and precisely to avoid contact with criminals (Decorte and Potter 2022). How these dynamics are perceived by international institutions—i.e. how Spain is seen from the outside to some extent—offers further interesting clues as to its approach. The Country Chapter on the rule of law situation in Spain in the 2021 European Commission Rule of Law Report points to corruption as one of the main barriers to the full development of the rule of law in Spain. The report highlights the absence of a holistic policy to prevent and reduce corruption in the country, underscoring its concern for corruption linked to drug trafficking, particularly those illicit activities taking place across the southern border (European Commission 2021: 9). The report emphasises that in the context of the implementation of the National Strategy against Organized Crime and Serious Crime 2019–2023 a relevant instrument is the Special Security Plan for Campo de Gibraltar 2020–2021. This Plan updates the one designed in 2018, aiming at ‘ensuring the necessary security conditions in Campo de Gibraltar and its surrounding areas, in response to changes in the modus operandi and activities of organised crime, thanks to the transnational environment in which they operate and their ability to adapt’ (European Commission 2021: 9). This 2021 Plan, which now extends the geographical scope of its strategy to the provinces of Huelva and Malaga, close to Campo de Gibraltar, focuses primarily on ‘strengthening the capacities of law enforcement authorities, including the training and specialization of agents’ (European Commission 2021: 10). The Special Security Plan for Campo de Gibraltar was designed by several ministries and came into force in July 2018 (Portal Presidencia Gobierno 2018).4 According to the Ministry of Interior’s own public 4 According to the Portal de la Presidencia del Gobierno’s website, ‘The Plan contemplates an investment of more than 900 million euros and involves ten ministries, which, in coordination with the Junta de Andalucía, the Provincial Council of Cádiz and the Association of Municipalities of Campo de Gibraltar, will develop actions aimed at achieving

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documents, the objective of the Special Plan is to ‘neutralize the negative impact of crime on the social and economic life of Campo de Gibraltar’ and ‘improve public security in the region, given the situation of loss of the principle of authority and the feeling of impunity by drug trafficking organizations’ (Departamento de Seguridad Nacional 2019). This is a joint plan of the National Police and the Civil Guard, two security forces with different but relevant competences in the field, which aims to contribute to alleviating the deterioration of what it sees as objective security conditions produced by the impact of drug trafficking, as well as to contain violent behaviour by criminal groups that sometimes target law enforcement officials (Departamento de Seguridad Nacional 2019). The Ministry of Interior considered the first year of implementation of this plan a success. However, it came to this conclusion using various indicators that usually refer to the size of markets, not the market-related harms —the number of seizures (149 tonnes of drugs, corresponding to 143 tonnes of hashish and 5.4 tonnes of cocaine). It also cited the number of people arrested (which amounted to 4,852, some of them alleged leaders of the organisations).5 Furthermore, the success was measured in terms of the reinforcement of National Police and Civil Guard agents (346 between both bodies), the implementation of 293 surveillance and control devices and the increase in the number of operations against drug trafficking (77.8%) and money laundering (86.9%). The Ministry also reported that 750 vehicles and 759,000 packets of smuggled tobacco had been seized (Ministerio del Interior 2019). The Plan’s budget for the July–December 2018 period amounted to e7 million, which was increased to e17 million for the period January–December 2019 (Departamento de Seguridad Nacional 2019). In November 2018 the government had quantified the global investment for this Plan at e900 million across several administrations, involving ten ministries that would work in coordination with regional and local authorities (Portal Presidencia Gobierno 2018). While recognising that the Plan’s initial goals went beyond security and also included employment, education and infrastructure development, no progress or ‘successes’ was reported in these areas.

an immediate impact while other actions will be focused on the medium and long term’. See Portal de la Presidencia del Gobierno (2018). 5 Data for the period between August 1, 2018 and June 30, 2019.

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Although limited, the Plan envisions the involvement of civil society. In 2018, the Ministry reported having held 40 meetings between law enforcement officials and community-based organisations. Moreover, 71 preventive activities in educational centres took place. The main function of this involvement is reported to be the increase of ‘the capacity to anticipate the movements of criminal groups’ and ‘address[ing] security concerns’. The balance of this first year from the Ministry emphasised that ‘social alarm due to drug trafficking has been reduced’ and ‘the principle of authority [our emphasis] has been re-established in the region’ (Ministerio del Interior 2019). The second phase of the Special Plan ran until the end of 2021, and entailed expanding, as noted above, its territorial scope to the rest of the province of Cadiz and the bordering provinces of Malaga and Huelva. The public investment foreseen for this new phase was e48 million (La Vanguardia 2021). The territorial expansion aimed to face the dispersion of criminal groups due to the pressure in the Strait area. In addition, a new asset recovery and management office was created in Algeciras, and law enforcement staff has been increased by 1265 new personnel from July 2018 to July 2021 (Rodríguez 2021). In 2022, the plan continued to further expand its territorial scope, adding the provinces of Granada, Almería and Seville, and received an allocation of e35 million (Portal Presidencia del Gobierno 2022). In summary, the basic political rationality inscribed in the management apparatus of the drug trafficking in Campo de Gibraltar is the restitution of the state authority in the area. This approach is based on a primary link between drugs and security rather than the relationship between communities’ involvement in drug markets and social exclusion. Likewise, the rationale behind this approach aims at reducing the size—and visibility— of illicit markets, and not at reducing the harms associated with them. The problematisation of the phenomenon is configured in such a way that the government does not assume responsibility for the state of things, but rather attributes its causes to elements that are beyond its control. As a result, the government applies drug control only within clearly identifiable and easily controllable limits. The special plans do not contemplate, for example, the corruption of different public agents that, acting as intermediaries, allow the traffic to be possible—such as customs agents, or police officers—: a real issue according to the 2021 European Commission Rule of Law Report. The successive assessments of the Special Plan for the Campo de Gibraltar, which measures the successes based on the

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control of inert things and the deployment of numbers rather than positive impacts on people’s lives, are not exhaustive enough to determine whether the improvement of the (reported) objective security conditions is a consequence or a direct result of the applied political technologies—for example, the increase in the presence of the state by means of the growing numbers of law enforcement agents, or the prohibition of narcoboats. For the authorities, the idea of control (however approximate) prevails over the evidence regarding what seems to work; and what seems not to.

4.3 The Securitisation of Drugs: The Neglect of Structural and Socioeconomic Factors The government discourse expresses certain clearly discernible political rationalities and technologies. There are notable silences too, however. The key official documents, including the aforementioned National Strategy against Organized Crime and Serious Crime for 2019–2023, notably do not include the socioeconomic conditions and the structural inequality of Andalusia in their diagnosis and analysis—structural factors that, in contrast, are very much present in economic analyses of this region (Delgado 2021a, b), and are particularly acute in the province of Cadiz and in the region of Campo de Gibraltar. Nor do they mention the fact that Spain is one of the countries with highest rates of drug use within the EU—especially cannabis and cocaine (Observatorio Español de las Drogas y las Adicciones 2021). These are national security documents, and so security is the backbone of their analysis, narrative and proposed solutions to problems. Yet, while in both theory and practice the concept of security has been deepened and widened in recent decades (Buzan and Hansen 2009), no official document produced by the Spanish government on security or organised crime analysed within this case study refers to, or mentions, the notions of human rights, equality or social justice. Drug control strategies are fundamentally focused on criminal policy and law enforcement operations. There seems to be no room for social policy, care or the primacy of certain basic social rights, including those that are mentioned in the 1978 Spanish Constitution, such as the right to health, the right to decent housing or the right to education. In other words, there is no place for human security or life conditions of the population.

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The crime/police dispositif oriented by this strategic line is directed to reduce the impact and scope of the illicit drug markets, especially international trafficking. It is much less focused on drug markets related harms or policy alternatives pushing beyond the desire of the government to make the space demarcated by regions mentioned in the documents calculable, controllable and free of elements that challenge the state’s internal sovereignty. Indeed, there are mentions in the governments’ statements of public health and the alleged harms associated with drug use, which are labelled as ‘devastating effects’. There is also a reference to cannabis use and the concern to ‘eliminate the false concept’ that it is a ‘soft or therapeutic drug’, as well as the need to ‘raise awareness of the harmful effects of drugs on health, life and people’s own coexistence’ (Ministerio de la Presidencia 2019: 39). The Strategy discussed above proposes these elements as ‘lines of action’, although it does not offer data on the impact of drug use, nor on the reality of their social and recreational use, which is well established and normalised in Spanish society. On the other hand, there is no mention of the unintended or undesired effects of control policies and interventions undertaken to counter organised crime. In these documents, and specifically in the Strategy, ‘social tensions’ or ‘social imbalances’ are always externalised and located in other spaces, such as Latin America or Africa (Ministerio de la Presidencia 2019: 27). They are never identified as social phenomena within Spanish society, communities, or geographies. References to social policies are thus limited to mentioning the need for ‘social reinsertion’ of criminal groups’ members (Ministerio de la Presidencia 2019: 31). The absence of the social dimension in the analysis of drug trafficking in the Spanish southern border is an important silence considering in particular the socioeconomic indicators of these territories—i.e. the place they occupy in the national division of labour and their participation in the national and international economy. In fact, these regions suffer serious structural deficits and shortages in relation to other areas of Spain and the EU. The broader social context in which criminal activity related to drug traffic takes place is however not part of the field of visibility established by the dispositif. This is not to say that social issues in these regions are entirely ignored by the government. However, they are not associated with drug economies—even if empirically the link is beyond dispute—and, as we argue below, they are linked to the political rationality of criminalising poverty. For example, the picture provided by the Andalusian Regional Strategy for Social Cohesion and Inclusion: Intervention in Disadvantaged

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Areas (ERACIS) of 2018 suggests that drug trafficking is not the main social problem in the area, nor should it be the main concern or priority for the government and public administrations. The poverty risk rate in Andalusia is among the highest in Spain, with 35.4% (2016 data), and 7% of the Andalusian population lives in the state of severe material deprivation. The unemployment rate in Andalusia is 10% higher than the Spanish average. This is particularly the case of long-term unemployment, ‘which is one of the factors most directly related to social exclusion’, according to the report. The precariousness of employment, average income, educational indicators (23% school dropout rate, for example) are all below the national average. The Regional Strategy also points out that Cadiz is the province with the highest risk of poverty and social exclusion (Consejería de Igualdad 2018: 20–24). What it does not mention is that it is the province where more drug trafficking organisations operate and where drug control operations are concentrated. Something similar can be observed if we zoom in on the municipal level. La Línea de la Concepción, the municipality bordering Gibraltar, has the worst socioeconomic indicators in the province of Cádiz, and in the whole of Spain. At the same time, it is one of the most active epicentres of drug trafficking and smuggling of the entire southern border. It would seem pertinent to ask what is the causal relationship between both social processes: the presence of drug markets and the high levels of exclusion and structural social inequality. Yet the link is curiously absent in the governmental discourse. The objective of the Regional Strategy, conceived by the Department of Equality and Social Policies of the Government of Andalusia, is to eliminate territoriality as a factor of exclusion, intervening in areas and municipalities where there are serious processes of social exclusion that hinder access to ‘full citizenship and the use and enjoyment of the rights of the welfare state’ (Consejería Igualdad 2018: 21). This focus contrasts with the political approach applied to manage illicit economies and drug control policies. As noted above, multiple Spanish government’s documents in this domain stress territoriality by pointing to the proximity to Morocco, or cultural ties with Latin America, as the main causes of the presence of these illicit economies in southern Spain. At the same time, they ignore something fundamental—in certain contexts, with social indicators more typical of developing countries, involvement in the drug trade can be one of the very few options for escaping social exclusion and structural poverty and gaining access to better life opportunities.

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Research over the last decade has shown how illicit economies generate violence, exploitation, hinder sustainable development and generate corruption and governance challenges (Buxton et al. 2020). Nevertheless, involvement in illicit economies can also provide relief to help overcome the immediate problems faced by these communities. In dealing with the consequences of the existence of illicit economies, governmental responses tend to frame this phenomenon as a security issue, which has often led to interventions that do more harm than good in these contexts (Gillies et al. 2019). Communities not only have to face the social and economic costs of illicit economies, but also the consequences of public policies aimed at managing them (Sagredo et al. 2016). Traditionally, these studies have covered the so-called ‘Global South’ contexts for which a rich research and public policy agenda has recently been developed. However, many situations and contexts geographically located in the ‘Global North’ may be similar enough to be susceptible to analysis of this type. The Spanish southern border, we propose, is one of them. The confluence in this territory of a dense drug trafficking activity on the one hand, and the acute socioeconomic inequality and exclusion on the other, which is problematised in relation to the ‘Global South’ but not in here, constitutes a key silence of policy design and makes this omission a true political choice of the different levels of Spanish governments. The silence on the potential negative social effects of drug control policies on the ground, lacking a real evaluation of current interventions, seems another important missing element. Even though an open and honest debate on drug policy reform, integrating elements of human rights and sustainability, is taking place in many parts of the world, the approach of the Spanish authorities to drug control still seems rather narrow, framed in punitive and coercive terms (crime disposition) that does not prima facie integrate any more comprehensive, governmental measures. That, however, does not mean it has no biopolitical effects, as shown below. What are the effects of the government’s silences? In particular, by virtue of their design the state policies demonstrate inefficiencies, aggravate the root causes of the illicit economies and lead to criminalisation of poverty. The absence of the social dimension in the diagnosis and policy responses of drug trafficking dynamics in South Spain is not something isolated. It is closely related to the tendency of successive Spanish governments to manage poverty and social exclusion from the standpoint of criminal policy, rather than through directed social policy interventions (Larrauri 2009), a phenomenon that has been observed in

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most Western countries since the late 1970s (Wacquant 2009; Ollero 2021). Andalusia, Spain’s leading region in rates of incarceration, is a paradigmatic example of such criminalisation of poverty. In 2019 there were more than 13,000 people in prison in Andalusia—a prison rate of 160 per 100,000 inhabitants compared to the 128 of the rest of Spain (Ollero 2020). According to Ollero, the characteristics of the Andalusian economy cannot be ignored in this triangulation between incarceration rate, socioeconomic indicators, and the process of criminalisation of poverty. With an eminently extractive nature and the ‘characteristics of a colony’, Andalusia’s economy is centred around activities with little added value such as tourism or agriculture. The precariousness, the material shortages, and the social exclusion to which these economic and work dynamics condemn a large part of the population give rise, according to this expert, to a ‘state of social insecurity that is camouflaged by activating the discourse of criminal insecurity’ (Ollero 2020). This is what, according to Wacquant, the ‘criminalisation of poverty’ consists of: ‘the constant confusion between insecurity and the “feeling” of insecurity’, expressly generated to channel ‘the diffuse anxiety provoked by a series of interrelated social changes’ (Wacquant 2015: 36). Looking at the social indicators of La Línea de la Concepción, according to the Local Plan of Intervention in Disadvantaged Areas for that municipality (2018), 20% of the population has no primary education and it is the third city with the highest unemployment rate in Andalusia, with an average unemployment rate of 35% in the period 2008–2018 (Ayuntamiento La Línea 2018: 3). La Línea is also the municipality with the lowest life expectancy in Spain: 79.7 years, compared to 86.2 of the richest municipality in the country, Pozuelo de Alarcón (EuropaSur 2019). For a number of historical, political and social reasons, it is a city with a very singular identity, a unique border community in Europe (Del Valle et al. 2018). Yet La Linea is also exceptional for being a permanent target of law enforcement operations. The city is a paradigmatic epicentre of drug bio/ necropolicy in the southern border (Mbembe 2003; Caminando Froteras 2021), including the fascination with narcoboats, precursors, cryptocurrencies, digital surveillance systems and other technologies, as well as new psychoactive substances (NPS) and synthetic derivatives. La Línea also receives sensationalist coverage of violence, and of poverty from the

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media, driving the stigmatisation of the population. This sensationalisation serves to legitimise certain policies and interventions in the border area (Goodhand 2021: 3). The media treatment of violence and poverty related to drugs is usually limited to collecting testimonies from law enforcement officials, government officials or prosecutors (Ortega 2021 et al.’s story for El País illustrates well this pattern). This information is rarely checked against testimonies or data from other sources. Nor are the testimonies usually collected of the people living in these territories, community leaders, people incarcerated for drug-related offences or their family and friends. These voices remain silent—with notable exceptions of local newspapers like Europa Sur or critical magazines like El Salto. El Salto or Portal de Andalucía are among the few media that link social exclusion and violence when covering this issue, thus differing from the government’s approach that tends to dissociate social policy from criminal policy in its narrative and practice. More commonly, however, the media portray a stigmatised image of these communities, generalising their involvement in drug markets, ‘blaming’ them for this involvement, as if it were merely the result of an individual choice, without any connection with the socioeconomic context, the lack of opportunities, or the consequences of repression and control policies. This leads to a cultural production of the reality of the border and of the dynamics of the illicit drug economy as something independent of the structural socioeconomic conditions of these territories which cannot be modified through public interventions and whose effects can only be treated—predominantly by punitive measures.

4.4

Narcoborder and Necropolitics of Drug Control: The Politics of the Alive, and of the Inert

In the Spanish governmental dispositif, Campo de Gibraltar and the adjacent areas emerge as a heterotopia—a place that creates a distinct world within worlds, juxtaposing in a single real space several sites that are in themselves incompatible (Foucault 1986: 6). It is a showcase of idealised Spanish countryside, but also a hotbed of organised crime and irregular migration and drug gateways, subject to dramatic cultural representations in the broader field of production that narrow and obfuscate the field

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of vision by silencing local voices and experiences in favour of politically effective stereotypes. To better illuminate what is at stake in this heterotopia, we propose to turn first to Goodhand (2021)s critical survey of narcofrontier. While narcofrontiers are typically localised in global peripheries, our analysis suggests that their features can be found also inside the European political order. For narcofrontier, where two distinct but powerful narratives built around border and drugs converge is, above all, a source of threat— defined as a result of problematisation practice—and the void of government. This is the twin problem of the narcofrontier, emerging from the convergence that gives rise to an ideological construct performing a series of functions (political, institutional, financial, ideational) that prevents the underlying power relations and vested interests that perpetuate a certain conception of these border spaces from being confronted. To remove the threat, it must be reterritorialised and made governable. That means that, as a solution to the problem, the state presence must be extended to the border zone, and the latter must be subject to statebuilding technologies of government, under whose pastoral but also punishing hand the pathologies of the normative order, parasitising on global flows and infrastructures, cannot continue to thrive. The cultural representations of Campo de Gibraltar that sustain this political rationality are indeed similar to broader imaginaries of global peripheries with limited or outside government control—the black spots and forgotten islands of disorder where nomadic war machines of the global order thrive that occlude the existence of local hybrid political orders (Boege et al. 2009), often combining traditional and modern, formal and informal elements, that resist the notion of ‘ungoverned territory’. In the case of Campo de Gibraltar, these local formations include, among others, civil society organisations focused on the promotion and defence of human rights—many in relation to the movements of migrants and refugees—, preservation of the ecosystems of the Strait of Gibraltar, associations of Spanish workers in the rock and the border area, or promotion of friendship between Andalusian and Moroccan populations. In Goodhand’s narcofrontier a gap is produced between the imaginary and the real everyday life along the border—which underlines the pathological effects of the policies applied to these imagined spaces (2021: 1), a similar divergence between policies and regulatory instruments applied in border control on one hand, and the material reality on the other,

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effecting serious human rights violations, is at play in the Spanish southern border, as Arce (2019) suggests. The statebuilding and development technologies of government deployed to transform and rule the narcofrontier are fundamentally in line with the precepts of global neoliberal governmentality. The state’s desire is to exercise the policing function, to see and to control, but not at the expense of impeding the circulation of the global neoliberal economy. The illicit flows must only be made licit, and the invisible made visible by expanding the state’s field of vision and plugging in the narcofrontier as a periphery. Narcofrontier, as Goodhand (2021) points out, is where all bad things come together in this imaginary, which in his view in fact impedes efforts to build sustainable peace. Yet the narrative remains stable due to methodological nationalism and pressures to elide complexity to devise simple fixes and justify interventions. Goodhand’s conclusion is an appeal—in reference to Scott (1998)—to move beyond seeing and talking like a state and bring to the fore subaltern perspectives to reimagine not just the peripheries, but also centres following a fundamentally relational understanding of the two. The spatiality of Campo de Gibraltar can be further explored through the conceptual perspective of ‘borderscape’. Borderscape refers to border as mobile and relational. It can fold inward, locking social groups inside the state in particular regimes of government; or outward, restricting and expelling. It is a zone of complexity and vitality where the inside (the order) and the outside (multiplicity and chaos) intersect (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007). It is multidimensional/multilevel, consisting of sites constituted in different symbolic and material forms and sociopolitical and cultural practices, and as such offers insight into political and social reconfigurations in the conditions of globalisation (Brambilla et al. 2015) where borders, while porous and shifting, continue to perform a protective function of keeping the other—whether migratory flows or drug traffickers—out, and no new political forms seem to replace them at the moment (Solanes 2016: 147). Bordering practices are ordering practices too, hence the shorthand of ‘b/ordering’. Borderscape as a device represents an alternative to the dominant landscape of power—landscapes standing for political devices structuring everyday lives (Jones et al. 2004: 116)—challenging the notion of locating the border at a specific place at the edge. This is very relevant for Campo de Gibraltar, which is a periphery on the inside, rather than located in a remote and hard-to-access corner of the Global South. Yet,

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as with the latter peripheries, the edge location in this case too performs a purification function. It externalises problems and contradictions from the constructed core of the state—in this case in the domain of drug control—, which needs to be, and indeed is performed as a phantasm through representation of central and uncontested authority, and static and stable borders of the (abstract) community. That which does not conform is marginalised, i.e. placed on the edges of the norm, or externalised. In this manner, through the interiorisation function of the state, the striated space is produced (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) by means of capturing, measuring, regulating and so making ‘governable’ (cf. Elden 2013; Ditrych et al. 2023). The resolution of what makes the state and how it is organised spatially rests on a hegemonic discourse and the bureaucratic knowledge consisting of collated facts about the governed population. But borderscape is not contained in a specific space—unlike the frontier produced in the discourse of the state, to which the notion of narcofrontier, however illuminating, may be conceptually too indebted. Borderscape can be recognised through struggles over inclusion and exclusion, drawing on a fundamentally processual understanding of the border construction inspired by Ranciére or Appadurai (1996), and embodied also in the concept of ‘bordering’ that conceives of borders as dynamic social processes and practices of social differentiation (cf. Paasi 1999; Brambilla et al. 2015). In the case of Campo de Gibraltar, these processes include, for example, neighbourhood and community struggles for inclusion in the circuits of public funding for infrastructure and transport in face of the state’s neglect and abandonment (Quesada 2019), or the sustained struggle by organisations working in the field of drug use inside an international trafficking hub, as expounded by the former Andalusian Ombudsman (Chamizo 2021). The region has had a considerably differentiated border identity for a long time, something that becomes more visible in initiatives such as that of Juan Franco, mayor of La Línea, to convert the municipality into an autonomous city with a political legal status similar to that of Ceuta and Melilla (Cañas 2021; González 2022). Having interrogated Campo de Gibraltar as a space to be made calculable and controllable in the government’s drug control, but also broader dispositif of authority and security, through a multitude of heterogenous practices yet fundamentally driven by the resurgent sovereignty, crime policing rationality, what does a biopolitical analysis of this space as a (narco-)borderscape reveal? Biopolitics, to recall, concerns administration,

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sustaining and ordering life of the population that is measured and made calculable through correlative, historically constituted knowledge formations. The drug control dispositif has protection of life as its strategy. Yet the study of Campo de Gibraltar as a distinct heterotopia of the global border, a (narco-)borderscape uncovers an intriguing aporia: to protect life in general, the life located in this space is taken out of the view, and the government practice focuses on inert things. This can be illustrated by policy documents such as the 2020 Annual National Security Report that performs, among others, a diagnosis, in terms of national security, of the impact caused by international drug trafficking through the Spanish southern border (Departamento de Seguridad Nacional 2020). If, as argued above, important elements of the reality on the ground, including through mediation by local voices, are occluded, this can be even extended further insofar as the people and the community substratum (population) in and through which drug trafficking takes place are taken out of view; and instead, inert things are foregrounded. Time and again, official reports, statements by the authorities or media pieces, as well as the evaluation of policy interventions and their ‘successes’, make reference to things—things that are intended to be controlled through other inert things that form part of the security dispositif. The case in point is the ‘narcoboats’ (narcolanchas ), containers of goods and drug caches and the interception of their movement by patrol cars, surveillance devices and binoculars. Even here, the prohibition rationality has clear limits. After narcoboats were banned by royal decree in 2018,6 the government argued in the 2020 Annual National Security Report that they represented a danger to the safety of navigation ‘due to their aggressive attitude and dangerous manoeuvres’ (Departamento de Seguridad Nacional 2020: 150). When one of them caused the death of a child on a beach in Algeciras, the event received significant media attention, reinforcing the discourse of security deficit in the Strait of Gibraltar region (Cañas 2018b). But while the Report assessed that the prohibition meant ‘a hard blow to drug traffickers who used this type of semi-rigid vessels or narco-boats’ (Departamento de Seguridad Nacional 2020: 71, 160), there does not appear to 6 See Real Decreto-ley 16/2018, de 26 de octubre, por el que se adoptan determinadas medidas de lucha contra el tráfico ilícito de personas y mercancías en relación con las embarcaciones utilizadas. Full text Available at: Boletín Oficial del Estado’s webpage, https://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2018-14747.

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be strong evidence to confirm that the move has had a significant impact on the dynamics of illicit drug trafficking in the area. Rather, it seems that drug traffickers adapted and now use other types of vessels (Sánchez Gento 2021; Ballesteros 2019). This is not to say that the government practice would have no biopolitical effects. It is rather through the seeking of controlling the things that make possible the undesirable circulation has as its ultimate objective the control of human bodies and lives—whether of migrants, or substance users. However, deploying the elements of the liberal security dispositif (Bigo 2008) aiming to control circulation at a distance in the conditions of global neoliberal society reinforces the process in which the (narco-) borderscape is constituted in the practices of interiorisation and externalisation as a zone of exception to which bare life may be consigned (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007: xx). It is at this point that Achile Mbembe’s (2003) notion of necropolitics comes to the fore. Unlike Agamben (1995) who combines sovereign power and biopower, Mbembe invokes necropower as the contemporary figure of sovereignty, or a specific terror formation of global modernity. While for Agamben the representation of the figure of contemporary sovereignty is the camp, for Mbembe it is the colony as a zone where violence of the state of exception operates in the service of civilisation, and which is subject to territorialising practices (that is, writing spatial relations) that lead to production of boundaries and hierarchies, subverting existing property arrangements or engaging in classification of people according to different categories, resource extraction or manufacturing particular cultural imaginaries. The colony as a diagram can indeed be extended also to the (narco-) boderscapes located at internal peripheries such as Campo de Gibraltar as zones where too violence of the state of exception enacted by the resurgent sovereignty, crime policing security dispositif operates in the service of civilisation and to protect life of the population—while, ironically and tragically, causing destruction of human bodies due to the nature of the related policy interventions. It is not confined to migrant confinement spaces mirroring the figure of the camp and betraying familiar exclusionary dynamics at the heart of EU’s bordering practices—as documented, e.g. by Ferrer-Gallardo, Albet-Mas and Espineira (2015) in the case of Punta Tarifa. (The authors speak of ‘limboscapes’ in reference to these areas where, as they argue, the spatial construction of ‘Europe’ takes place.) Indeed, it covers also the broader, open spaces constructed

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in the drug control dispositif, underscoring Mbembe’s point (2003: 39) that biopower is insufficient in accounting for contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death.

4.5

Conclusion

The government’s drug control policies—the attention and resources of the state dedicated by the state to subjecting to control this internal periphery, the illicit traffic passing through here, or eradicating the pathologies of the organised crime surrounding it, and the sensationalist cultural production centred on Campo de Gibraltar notwithstanding, local illicit drug markets—seem to exercise remarkable resilience. As illustrated above, the Spanish southern border and especially the region of Campo de Gibraltar continue to be an epicentre of illicit drug trafficking activities. Although the features and implications of this phenomenon have changed since the mid-2010s, the dynamics of exclusion and socioeconomic inequality continue to be the social base that fuels this illicit trade. However, this link remains absent from government policy approaches, which seem more comfortable with the drugs–security nexus. Dealing with the structural causes of a border area traditionally neglected by the state seems more complex and less attractive for gathering electoral support in other regions of the country. Policies focused on improving the lives of these communities have been pushed aside in favour of policies focused on the control of inert things, based on specific security plans focused on easily ‘accountable’ and controllable issues, yet with limited proven efficiency in significantly reducing both the size of the markets and the harms associated with their existence. Lessons from what has and has not worked in other contexts, in terms of militarisation and securitisation of drug control, may be relevant in the context of southern Spain; yet they do not seem to be learned. The government attempts to police Campo de Gibraltar and the flows that pass through here is however far from free from biopolitical effects. Since Campo de Gibraltar as a (narco-)borderscape is constructed as a zone of exception, effects not only in the zones of (migrant) confinement but more broadly can be explored through the critical biopolitical analysis. Protecting biological bodies and by extension the body politic against the ‘poison’ that spreads through capillary means rather than hoards (of foreign armies) or waves (of migrants), the drug control dispositif, enrolling elements from the more general surveillance apparatus in which

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inert things are mobilised for the purpose of surveillance of flows made possible by other inert things (e.g. narcoboats), emerges as a distinct form of biopolitical life and death management enacted by the resurgent sovereignty.

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CHAPTER 5

Conclusion

Abstract This concluding chapter recalls how the critical biopolitical analysis broadens horizons of analysis of the related processes, how the drug control regime can benefit from its current crisis and how the effects of resurgent sovereignty and mutant neoliberalism can be resisted and averted against the background of the possible future turns of ‘vital politics’. Keywords Critical theory · Science fiction · Emancipation · Mind-altering substances · Vital politics · Drug control · Foresight

Drugs continue to have a powerful hold over human and state apparatuses’ imagination (Gootenberg 2009: 31). They produce fantasies of absolute control over traffic across the borders of sovereign states—and therefore these borders as such—as much as over bodies of citizens so that they can be enrolled for strategic purposes and escape to nonplaces inaccessible to the interiorising gaze and hold of the state. Resurgent sovereignty and neoliberalism together strive to control or at least modulate the sea change in which technoscientific progress, translated both in the capacity to produce new substances that can alter or enhance the faculties of human body and mind, accelerates the disruption of the sociopolitical status quo. In the conclusion of this book, we recall © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 O. Ditrych and C. Sánchez Avilés, Governing Human Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43552-2_5

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how the critical biopolitical analysis broadens horizons of analysis of the related processes; but also how the drug control regime can benefit from its current crisis, and how the necropolitical effects of resurgent sovereignty and mutant neoliberalism can be resisted and averted against the background of the possible future turns of ‘vital politics’. Biopolitics, seeking to administer, sustain and order life and population and operating through prohibitionist and regulatory means as much as the interplay of power and knowledge, governs the global drug control dispositif targeting both individuals and populations. This is a theoretical proposition we made in our earlier explorations of the international drug control regime. In this volume, we seek to advance it further— and make the case that drug control, at various scales, presents one of the clearest manifestations of the ways in which biopower is exercised in the late modernity, complementing earlier forms of power with which it interacts and hybridises; and that for that reason, it warrants a detailed exploration from the global political perspectives. We engaged in a triad of detailed investigations combining diverse global domains and milieus. We interrogated the relations of power and knowledge in the drug control dispositif—and the hierarchies of knowledge and regimes of visibility (‘light’) produced by their interplay. Looking at one particular case study, of the Czech Republic, we explored how both socialist authoritarian and liberal democratic regime types but also, more broadly, resurgent sovereignty and neoliberal pressures imprint on a national drug policy. Turning the attention to individuals and local communities, we looked into the operation of the drug control dispositif at one particular (Global North) periphery, the Spanish Southern (narco)borderscape. While empirical, these investigations all use a Foucauldean conceptual toolbox of biopolitics, dispositif and governmentality—and more broadly the perspective of critical continental theory. To mobilise them is to displace the perspective of (‘seeing like’) the state and the use of academic reason in line with the traditional theory to solve problems of the state that are defined within the horizons of the field of visibility that it imposes on political imagination—and so challenge this traditional theory by advancing a critical theoretical project (Cox 1981). By broadening the field of vision, these concepts make it possible to explore key rationalities in the contemporary global order from the outside—including those related to the unlikely collusions between resurgent sovereignty and neoliberalism, and their biopolitical effects. That means also reaching

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beyond the liberal critique centred around the concept of rights awarded to humans as members of polities rather than reduced to their bare life and faced with unmediated effects of power (cf. Agamben 1998). The biopolitical critique homes in not on denial or insufficient expanse or reach of these rights protecting individuals. It rather targets the comprehensive ways of life that (co-)produce them by enrolling them in certain mechanisms (appareils) which mobilise their productive capacities—such as those of modern capitalist society—, and locking them in them, or alternatively castigating and exiling them from society in response to their strategies of refusal to have their productive capacities mobilised to sustain those mechanisms—to which illicit substances provide an avenue. The critical biopolitical perspective we advocate also zooms in on the role of knowledge (in this book in particular in Chapter 2), both in the sense of concrete formations and orders of discourse determining the rules for making authoritative statements about how things are (e.g. what counts as ‘evidence’) as either is crucial to maintaining these operations of power. They do so at the level of the state, and also the macrolevel to discipline the challenges to these globalised biopolitical effects of enrolment of human bodies threatened by the use of substances, and employing bodies in ‘unproductive’ ways. Last but not least, the perspective explores not only ways of life, but also ways of death. To that end, we draw inspiration from Mbembe’s necropolitics to illuminate how the social diagrams of control employed in the (narco)borderscapes— including internal peripheries of the Global North—enable and validate violence that by extension causes material destruction of human bodies, ironically in the service of protection of life. Building on these diagnostical interventions, what strategies at the intersection of research and political practice can such perspective provide to limit the adverse biopolitical effects on resurgent sovereignty and mutant neoliberalism in the field of drug control? In this concluding chapter, we propose three: reproblematisation and experiment, regime change, and foresight. The first strategy, reproblematisation and experiment, consists in a steady pressure to foreground welfare of the people. It is not to deproblematise the issue of drug control and policy, but to desecuritise it in the sense of removing the legitimisation for punitive and prohibitionist policies that, as demonstrated here and elsewhere, fail to achieve their own stated objectives (formulated, as illustrated in the case of Campo de Gibraltar) within the framework of problematisation conceived by the

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state. Desecuritisation means not to turn a blind eye to drug-related threats to social fabric, such as empowering parasitic criminal networks— which benefit more than suffer from the futile attempts to place obstacles in the way of global flows. It instead allows for foregrounding social policies that identify and ultimately remove the root causes of the illegal drug markets that have these effects, and reinforce cohesion of the body politic on which functional democracies can thrive, rather than polarise and marginalise through ‘pest control’; policies focused on sustaining life rather than controlling inert things. What it necessitates is sensitivity to, and the recognition of, the ideological function of the situational securitisation of the disconnecting the mind and body, and the individual and social present in the dominant discourse of drug control; the corresponding reflexivity concerning how, in processes very much akin to those traced by Foucault in regard to sexuality, the normal is established by first forcefully defining the abnormal (‘drug abuse’); broadening political imagination beyond established patterns and inertias that contribute to reproducing of the ‘drug problem’ and the associate anxieties and insecurities; and, last but not least, polemically confronting those for whom reproduction of these insecurities carries economic or political benefit (and who can be considered to constitute a ‘drug control industry’ akin to one in the field of migration control, cf. Rodriguez and Fanjul 2017)—on the understanding that security would be the death of the state apparatus (Campbell 1998) since it would make it unnecessary. Could neoliberalism be an ally here, with its professed emphasis on individual freedom of action, innovation drive, and imposing limits on state authority? In the case of Czech Pirate party, and under the present pressure on public finances, the case for a regulated cannabis market is indeed made using the neoliberal rhetoric—the state’s interference in the market produces worse outcomes for everyone, including the state that loses tax revenue it could use to buttress the public finances. Yet while appropriating the neoliberal discourse may seem at face value a sensible tactic, those who seek to liberalise drug control would be well advised to take into consideration the unholy alliance between resurgent sovereignty and (mutant) neoliberalism discussed earlier in this volume with regard to drug control—in particular in view the prospective evolution of the altering substances and their social and economic impacts that we contemplate below. The reproblematisation should go hand in hand with the will to experiment in drug regulation (cf. Roberts and Chen 2013). This means the

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courage first to recognise that the emperor is naked, that is, that the presently dominant patterns of drug control fail both from the normative perspective that foregrounds social welfare, and by measure of their own stated objectives. Second, it entails a push for unorthodox innovative solutions to the (reformulated) problem that elide the rigid moralistic postures regarding drug control that, for historically contingent reasons that relate to the particular discipline and mode of ‘care for the self’, imposed by the capitalist economy in which all use of time must be subjected to some productive goal and life self-value is deferred to some (never reached) point in the future, separate some abominable psychoactive substances (‘drugs’) from others rendered less threatening, or make certain uses (namely medical) more legitimate than others. These innovative solutions concern, inter alia, decriminalising (even regulating) the use of substances, but also the next, much more complicated, issue— deciding what policies to adopt with regard to people involved in the small-scale drug trade, often with social exclusion as a root cause. The courage mentioned above is needed in particular if we recall that while drug control has been ineffective in reducing the size of drug markets and the harm they cause, it has been very functional to other, more veiled objectives—social control, or generating public support for punitive populism that instrumentally uses drug policy not to make people’s lives better, but to control and punish specific populations, particularly when faced with the risk of the subversion of status quo. The dominant knowledge formations shaping drug control policies structurally limits the capacity to act—hence the need to break through their enclosures and engage in creativity and experimental political intervention opening the possibility of new modes of collective actions (Connolly 2013). A specific area to which such experimental political intervention should be directed is the international drug control regime. The regime witnesses an extended crisis as the hegemonically imposed punitive prohibitionism, and powerful inertia associated with the operation of institutional, structural and productive power (cf. Ditrych and Sanchéz-Avilés 2019) are countered with growing deviation in implementation and exploring—sometimes indeed in experimental ways— the regime’s margins of flexibility (Bewley-Taylor 2012). (The Czech Republic, discussed earlier, is at present only one case in point.) The crisis should be used as an opportunity to drive a more substantial ‘regime change’, however.

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In earlier publications, we suggested several pathways for such change (Sanchéz-Avilés and Ditrych 2018). First, it is the review of international conventions that form the backbone of the regime, including their provisions and schedules of substances, to desecuritise and destigmatise use of those substances without substantial detrimental individual and public health effects. Second, it is foregrounding in policy making what could be termed a particular instance of ‘insurgent knowledge’ related to drug control—empirical evidence of the limitations and (unintended) effects of punitive policies, and periodically reviewed state of art knowledge (originating in multiple disciplines, and multiple centres of knowledge production) in relation to the controlled substances in the schedules. Third, the statistics and benchmarking that are at the heart of the international drug control governmentality (Sanchéz-Avilés and Ditrych 2020) should be converted to focus more on indicators related to public health, social welfare and crime prevention. Fourth, marginal practice should be brought to the regime’s centre and mainstreamed, supported by, fifth, critical but empirical knowledge causally linking policy designs and socially beneficial outcomes. Within the latter framework, it would moreover be advisable to place at the forefront of the European debates on drug policy reform issues that have long been part of the discussion in the Americas: the relationship with social justice, racial discrimination and the stigmatisation of certain communities—like migrants populations and Roma—that featured in this book too. In other words, insurgency needs to be transformed into a systemic reform. To that end, challenging in transversal manner the ways in which dominant knowledge is (re-)produced is key. In this volume, we explored how the interplay of (scientific) knowledge—and what passes for ‘evidence’ based on certain criteria—and power consolidates the regime status quo, that is to say, how knowledge shapes, and is shaped by politics. Breaking this vicious circle of the ‘evidence-based policy paradox’ and deactivating the ideological function mainstream knowledge performs in the drug control dispositif is far from a purely theoretical endeavour—it is a condition sine qua non for dispassionate evaluation and innovative design of modern drug policies. It will not suffice to broaden the horizons of traditional knowledge. Rather, what is at stake is the constitution of critical drug knowledge. Such knowledge, recognising and building on the efforts that have already been initiated in this regard by many academics and civil society organisations in terms of broadening what is

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considered legitimate knowledge, and to reinforce the dialogue of epistemologies, carries the emancipatory potential to release both the architects and the subjects of drug control policies from the orthodox scientific knowledge’s bind—sustained also by the broader cultural impositions of the life in (late) capitalist society that instrumentalise time and place premium on individual subject’s productivity, and refocus drug policy on sustaining life, reinforcing social cohesion, adherence to inalienable and indivisible human rights and strengthening democracy and civil society. A veritable foresight industry has emerged over recent years, advertising the need to develop a culture of preparation and anticipation for policy makers in the face of (‘unprecedented’) complex global challenges. A coterie of armchair futurologists now engage in fighting emerging ‘fires’, formulating myriads of ‘what ifs’ and so seeking—in the more elaborate versions of the methodology—to devise virtual pluriversa in which strategies to achieve the governmental and business actors’ ends can best be achieved. ‘Strategic foresight’ can be mocked. It can also be appropriated as a critical strategy—not taming, but navigating the complex terrain of unpredictable future in the service not of states or other powerful actors’ interests, but those marginalised and disenfranchised. Such a move would also mean redefining the now fashionable concept of resilience in a critical manner (for some sources of inspiration for this move cf. Cretney 2014; Dunn Cavelty et al. 2015; Bourbeau and Vuori 2015; Coaffee and Fussey 2015). That is, not as a prima facie security concept, following a defensive rationality shielding the institutional status quo in the face of the anxiety and ontological insecurity to ‘hybrid warfare’ by the practices of shock absorption, continuity management and adaptation to withstand future calamities nor as a part of the neoliberal project of responsibilisation of communities and individuals hand in hand with limiting of the provision of public goods by public authorities; but rather devising innovative means to sustain societies by means of sometimes experimental and participatory, competent and compassionate policy designs that are anchored in critical drug knowledge and that serve not parochial but general interests in health and social welfare. ‘Science fiction is as much a guide to where we are as a vision of where we are going’, Silverberg wrote long ago in Drug Themes in Science Fiction (1974). The field of future possibilities in social effects of substance use remains as broad as when his report was conceived. Science fiction can therefore be one useful device to structure critical foresight of how this field may be transforming in particular in the conditions

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of ‘vital politics’ discussed in relation to substance use in the introductory chapter of this book. The advent of vital politics promises to deepen the crisis in the drug control regime as the engineering interventions—whether biochemical (‘smart drugs’) or cybernetic (consumable ‘nanobots’)—into human life, turned into an ‘emergent form’ challenge the precariously stabilised notions of abnormality (and by extension, normality) in substance use. In other words, the normalisation of these interventions will undermine the general punitive prohibitionist rationality of drug control. The fast pace and distribution of technological and scientific innovation and hence production capacities of a variety of means (e.g. ‘designer drugs’) of such intervention to alter human mind, expand intelligence or sensory capacities, control cognitive faculties by narrowing the perception of reality or, on the contrary, piercing through it, will make the bureaucratic rationality of keeping ‘schedules’ obsolete to the point of ridicule. Disarranging the normal and abnormal and thus deepening the crisis in the international drug control regime is an effect of vital politics that we proposed in the introduction of this book. There, we also argued that while the protection against emancipation in the form of escapism offending the mainstream demands and desires of the capitalist economy remains in place, the biovalue that has profound effects on the definition of the abnormal/normal is now forcefully (co-)defined in the new, parochial field—the biotech industry. We also proposed the relevance of the vital politics’ pressures towards responsibilisation in the face of the new forms of ‘cultivation of life’ (which could be seen as a new form of productivity management inculcated in the individual subject of capitalist economy) but also pointed out the stubbornly maintained ‘fantasies of control’ by the state apparatus—both results of the (co-)productive relations of mutant neoliberalism and resurgent sovereignty. There is no need to revise these propositions. In the conclusion we would instead like to highlight, in a complementary manner, some more fundamental contestations and controversies that the advent of vital politics portends for drug control. At the most abstract level, but with very real biopolitical effects, it is the issue of how is human nature constituted in view of these biochemical and bioengineering enhancements, and what it means for the human subjectivity. New hierarchies and inequalities are bound to emerge, some along racial, other along capital accumulation lines that, if unregulated, are prone to reproduce and intensify based on uneven access to biotechnological enhancements including substances

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that improve intelligence or cognitive skills. In this world of new divisions, substances can also be used for elites’ enhancement in an institutionalised manner to operate global economy in a more efficient manner—and, with the ‘second age’ of outer space exploration ongoing at present, not just global, but indeed interplanetary. Like in Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), production of such ‘spice’ on which the systems of government and economy would become reliant, or which would provide some collective actors distinct advantage, could become yet another source of acute, and possibly violent geopolitical competition. Perhaps such substances could improve or accelerate individuals’ cognitive processes—the latter akin to the potion in H.G. Wells’ The New Accelerator (1901)—but also attune them to create something like a hive mentality, similar to the effect of Jaspers in Herbert’s Santaroga Barrier (1968) that could be explored, e.g. by militaries. No longer would sanctioned ‘drugs’ serve to remove abnormality—restoring the subjects to the state of health and recovering their ability to perform social functions. Rather, they would alter normality in nonstigmatising manner. Human bodies’ enhancement and alterity to facilitate, or even enable, colonisation of the Moon or Mars to adapt to natural conditions or the need to traverse sheer distances from the Earth’s metropoleis to space colonies could produce biological, but also biopolitical effects—forming new, durably different (‘enhanced’) human populations with distinct political, and possibly even biological (‘races’) identity constructs. Responding to the foreseen transformational effect of the general purpose artificial intelligence (AI), psychotropic substances enhancing human faculties could develop into means to better collaborate with the machines, and even keep up with them (e.g. by adapting the mind to swarms of data streams) and preserving their subservient position. In the dystopian literature, most famously Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), substances are means not for enhancement, but population control. While the logic of late capitalism is not to take time away, as ‘soma’ indeed does by providing endless stream of pleasure, but rather to make subjects hyperproductive (and so use even their spare time ‘productively’ while limiting the recourse to restorative sleep incompatible with the late capitalism’s patterns, cf. Crary 2014), collective manipulation through artificial means is now a fact of human life due to the operation of social media algorithms, and making population docile when faced with new divides and transformations caused by new technologies remains a distinct possibility that could in fact be assisted, or even maliciously operated by artificial intelligence(s). The polar opposite of Dr. Jekyll’s draught

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that makes his primordial personality free of inhibitions surface in Stevenson’s novel (1886), and of Moloko Plus ‘with knives in it’ imbibed by the lead characters in Burgess’ The Clockwork Orange (1962), the end result here would be tame, docile subjects inhabiting totalitarian societies, thoroughly unaware of their own metamorphosis, and in fact feeling emancipated and empowered to realise endless possibilities through their biomodified bodies. Both traditional and modern, engineered substances can be used also on the society’s margins, in a conventional way as a subcultural matter and a means of escapism, raising self-awareness, or pleasure—in addition to other possibly addictive forms including digital escapes to virtual reality and gaming ‘otherworlds’—, and also as a means of more efficient resistance and insurgency as these systems of power will be able to benefit from enhancements of their own. A particular form of escapism facilitated by substances can be imagined as fleeing from the stream of time, as displayed in Christopher Nolan’s Inception where elderly people could achieve (here synchronised) long-term separation of their ailing bodies and their minds, translocated to another experiential plane—a contemporary, even if imperfect resemblance to the effect of the ‘plant of heartbeat’, the first recorded reference in literature to a substance from The Epic of Gilgamesh (where immortality ultimately too eludes the protagonist since the plant is consumed by a snake). Where soma in Brave New World takes time away, the substance in the Inception gives the consumers a new lease of time—even if for the mind only. Whether visionary and utopian, empowering mankind and heralding new stages of existence, or dystopian, the possibilities of future substance production and use (and thus also drug control policies) suggest vast biopolitical effects that currently, notwithstanding all other challenges faced by humankind, may in their systemic disruptive outcomes be matched only by the parallel evolution of general purpose artificial intelligence. That is why we believe a research programme structured around critical analysis of biopolitics of drug control is as timely and relevant as ever. This critical analysis should examine the evolutions of drug control dispositif and its ‘subject effects’ on targeted individuals and populations at different scales from global to local—that is, not limited to the operation of the international drug control regime, but also the dispositif’s micropolitical effects a few of which we put forward in this volume. That it may interrogate the operation of the drug control dispositif as

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it becomes, adapting to the future realities, instead of ex post facto interpretation and evaluation, and contribute to devising innovative policy solutions as a part of the critical drug knowledge project, imbues it with a considerable critical, emancipatory potential—not to escape the double pressure of mutant neoliberalism and resurgent sovereignty to a ‘final circle of paradise’, to paraphrase the title of Arkadi and Boris Strugatski’s 1965 novel where the substance ‘sleg’ transports users to a state of bliss, before killing them—but to carve out political space for more competent and sensitive policies.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Crary, Jonathan. 2014. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso. Campbell, David. 1998. Writing Security. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bewley-Taylor, David R. 2012. International Drug Control. Consensus Fractured: Cambridge University Press. Bourbeau, Philippe, and Juha Vuori. 2015. Security, Resilience and Desecuritisation: Multidirectional Moves and Dynamics. Critical Studies on Security 3 (3). Coaffee, Jon, and Peter Fussey. 2015. Constructing Resilience through Security and Surveillance. Security Dialogue 46 (1): 86–105. Connolly, William. 2013. The ‘New Materialism’ and the Fragility of Things. Millenium 41 (3). Cox, Robert W. 1981. Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory. Millennium 10 (2): 126–155. Cretney, Raven. 2014. Resilience for Whom? Emerging Critical Geographies of Socio-Ecological Resilience. Geography Compass 8 (9): 627–640. Ditrych, Ondrej, and Constanza Sanchéz Avilés. 2019. The International Drug Prohibition Regime as Security Regulation. In Regulating Global Security: Insights from Conventional and Uncoventional Regimes, eds. Nik Hynek, Ondrej Ditrych and Vit Stritecky. London: Palgrave. Dunn Cavelty, Myriam, Mareille Kaufmann, and Kristian Søby Kristensen. 2015. Resilience and (In)Security: Practices, Subjects, Temporalities. Introduction to a Special Issue. Security Dialogue 46 (1): 3–14. Gootenberg. Paul. 2009. Talking About the Flow: Drugs, Borders, and the Discourse of Drug Control. Cultural Critique 71: 13–46. Roberts, Bryan, and Chen Yu. 2013. Drugs, Violence, and the State. Annual Review of Sociology 39: 105–125.

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Rodríguez, Virginia, and Gonzalo Fanjul. 2017. La industria del control migratorio. ¿Quién gana en España con las políticas fronterizas de la Unión Europea?. Fundación PorCausa. Sanchéz, Avilés, and Constanza, Ondrej Ditrych. 2018. The Global Drug Prohibition Regime: Prospects of Stability and Change in an Increasingly Less Prohibitionist World. International Politics 55 (3): 463–481. Sanchéz, Avilés, and Constanza, Ondrej Ditrych. 2020. The Evolution of International Drug Control under the United Nations. In Research Handbook on International Drug Policy, eds. David Bewley-Taylor and Khalid Tinasti. London: Edward Elgar. Silverberg, Robert. 1974. Drug Themes in Science Fiction. Rockville: National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Index

A Africa, 11, 34, 65, 76–78, 85 Agamben, Giorgio, 4, 20, 24, 94, 105 Algeciras, 77–80, 83, 93 Almería, 83 Alteration, mind, 3, 103, 110, 111 Andalusia, 77, 80, 84, 86, 88 Andes, 59 ANO, Czech Republic, 32 Antwerp, 79 Artificial intelligence (AI), 111, 112 Asia, 65 Assemblage, 2, 3, 6, 47 Association of Nongovernmental Organisations, Czech Republic, 31 Authoritarianism, 12, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 28 Ayahuasca, 12, 36, 57

B Babiš, Andrej, 28, 32, 36 Barcelona, 24, 78

Biopolitics, 2, 3, 5, 6, 10, 12, 21, 92, 104, 112 Biopower, 2, 3, 6, 25, 45, 94, 95, 104 Biotechnological industry, 11 Biovalue, 11, 110 Borders, 29, 76–78, 83, 86, 91, 92, 94, 103 Borderscape, 91, 92 (narco) borderscape, 5, 7, 13, 21, 24, 34, 37, 76, 92–95, 104, 105 Brave New World (novel by Aldous Huxley), 111 Butler, Judith, 24 C Cadiz, 83, 84, 86 Campo de Gibraltar, 5, 13, 34, 76–84, 89–95, 105 Canada, 61, 62, 65 Cannabis, 13, 31, 33, 36, 37, 44, 50, 53, 56, 59–66, 77, 78, 81, 84, 85, 106

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 O. Ditrych and C. Sánchez Avilés, Governing Human Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43552-2

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INDEX

Capitalism, 6, 28, 111 Ceuta, 76, 92 China, 65 Christian Democraticy Party ˇ (KDU-CSL), Czech Republic, 30 Civic Democrats (ODS), Czech Republic, 30 Civil society, 20, 28, 35, 52, 55, 77, 83, 90, 108, 109 Clockwork Orange (novel by Anthony Burgess), 112 Coca leaf, 12, 59, 66 Colombia, 22, 61, 65 Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), 20, 58, 63–65 Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, United Nations, 53 ˇ Communist Party (KSCM), Czech Republic, 30 Convention on Psychotropic Substances (1971), 7, 58 Coproduction, 47 Costa del Sol, 78, 80 Crime, 22, 29, 82, 85, 108 organised, 20, 23, 30, 34, 80, 81, 84, 85, 89, 95 Critical biopolitical analysis, 2, 95, 104 Critical Theory, 104 Cultural production, 13, 76, 79, 89, 95 Czech Republic, 12, 20, 23, 28, 29, 33, 35, 37, 50, 57, 61, 104, 107 D Decriminalisation, 28–31, 36 Deleuze, Gilles, 4, 45, 92 Democracy, 12, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26–28, 109 transition to, 12 Desecuritisation, 106

Dispositif, 3–5, 8–14, 20–22, 25, 33, 37, 43–47, 55, 76, 83, 85, 89, 92–95, 103, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112 Drug control, 2, 3, 5–14, 20–27, 35–37, 43–48, 50–56, 58, 61, 62, 66, 75, 76, 78, 83, 84, 86, 87, 92, 93, 95, 104–110, 112 ‘differentiated’, 37 Drug control regime, international, 5, 7, 13, 35, 44, 56, 57, 62, 66, 107, 110, 112 reform of, 13 Drug markets, 50, 51, 54, 77, 78, 80, 83, 85, 86, 89, 95, 106, 107 Drug policy, 1, 12, 13, 19, 20, 23, 26–32, 37, 44, 47, 49, 51, 54–56, 87, 104, 107–109 evidence-based paradox, 49, 52, 53, 57, 65, 67 prohibitionist, 22, 35, 51–53, 60, 62, 66, 104, 105, 107, 110 punitive, 20 Drug science, 27, 44, 48, 66 constructivist, 47 critical, 13, 28, 47 traditional, 28, 48, 108 Drug traffic, 11, 22, 76, 79–83, 85–87, 91, 93, 95 Dune (novel by Frank Herbert), 111

E Economy, 7, 23, 56, 79, 85, 88, 91, 107, 110, 111 global, 76, 77, 111 illicit, 89 Egypt, 65 Emancipation, 11, 110 Enhancement, biological, 110 Escapism, 110, 112 European Union, 35, 49, 65

INDEX

Evidence, 13, 21, 23, 27, 34, 35, 44, 45, 49–61, 63–66, 81, 84, 94, 105, 108 hierarchies of, 10, 21, 27, 44, 46–48, 58, 61, 62, 66 Exception, state of, 19, 20, 23, 24, 94 Expert Committee on Drug Dependence, WHO, 58, 62

F Foresight, 49, 105, 109 as a critical strategy, 13 Foucault, Michel, 1–4, 7, 14, 45, 89, 106

G Galicia, 78 Germany, 36, 56, 61 Gibraltar, Strait of, 76, 90, 93 Global North, 10, 11, 21–23, 87, 104, 105 Global South, 22, 23, 76, 87, 91 Global War on Terror, 21, 24 Governmentality, 3, 6, 9, 20, 21, 24, 25, 104, 108 global (neo)liberal, 21, 26, 91 Government Council for Drug Policy Coordination, Czech Republic, 31 Granada, 83 ‘Greater than small amount’, Czech Republic, 30, 31 Grey literature, 52

H Hashish, 77–82 Havel, Václav, 28, 30 Health, public, 2, 33, 36, 61, 85, 108 Heterotopia, 7, 13, 21, 46, 76, 89, 90, 93

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Huelva, 77, 81, 83 Human mind, 110 alteration of, 110 Human rights, 20, 24, 34, 53, 54, 56, 59, 61, 62, 77, 78, 84, 87, 90, 91, 109 Hungary, 65

I Imperialism, 6 Inception (movie by Christopher Nolan), 112 India, 65 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 53 International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), 30 Iran, 65

J Jamaica, 65 Japan, 65 Jasanoff, Sheila, 47

K Klaus, Václav, 28 Knowledge decolonised, 44, 48 democratization of, 61 dominant, 107, 108 hierarchies of, 12, 44, 104 ‘insurgent’, 108 neocolonial, 59, 66 visibility function, 44

L La Línea de la Concepción, 77, 79, 80, 86, 88 Latin America, 78, 85, 86

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Lisbon, 24 LSD, 28 Luxembourg, 36 M Malaga, 81, 83 Malta, 36, 56, 61, 62 Market civilisation (neoliberal), 6, 8, 26 Mbembe, Achile, 5, 76, 88, 94, 95, 105 Mediterranean (Sea), 77 Melilla, 76, 92 Mexico, 33, 54, 61, 65 Migration, 5, 36, 75, 77, 89, 106 migrants, 34 Molecular vision of life, 10 Morocco, 65, 76–79, 86 Murcia, 77, 80 N Narcoboats, 8, 84, 88, 93, 96 Narcofrontier, 76, 90–92 National Institute of the Mental Health, Czech Republic, 35 National Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Addiction, Czech Republic, 31, 32 Nature, politics of, 11 Necropolitics, 5, 25, 89, 94, 105 Neoliberalism, 6, 28, 103, 104, 106 embedded, 26 mutant, 12, 13, 26, 28, 104–106, 110, 113 Nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), 31, 32, 34, 77 Normality, 2, 10, 110, 111 Numbers (as technology), 7, 51, 57 P Pavel, Petr, 36

Pirate Party, Czech Republic, 28, 37, 106 Political rationalities, 9, 44, 46, 84 reformatory programmes, 45 regulative ideals, 45 Populism, 26, 107 Poverty, 34, 80, 86, 88, 89 criminalisation of, 85, 87, 88 Power, 1–8, 10, 13, 14, 24, 25, 27, 36, 43–45, 47, 51, 58, 76, 90, 91, 104, 105, 108, 112 and knowledge, 1, 12, 26, 44, 66, 104 Problematisation, 9, 27, 33, 36, 44, 46, 47, 51, 66, 83, 90, 105 Prohibitionism, 22, 60, 107 Psychoactive Substances Act (2016), United Kingdom, 25 R Resilience, 95, 109 Responsibilisation, 11, 26, 109, 110 Risk management, 24, 25 Roma (ethnicity), 30, 34, 108 Rose, Nikolas, 2, 6, 9–11, 52 Russia, 65 S Santaroga Barrier (novel by Frank Herbert), 111 Schedules of substances, International Drug Control Regime, 108 Science, 12, 27, 46–50, 53, 54, 58, 66 authority of, 27 legitimising effect of, 48 standards, 51 Science fiction, 109 Securitisation, 7, 22, 30, 76, 84, 95, 106 Seville, 83

INDEX

Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (1961), 58 ˇ Social Democrats (CSSD), Czech Republic, 30 South Africa, 65 Sovereignty, 3, 5, 21, 22, 24, 26, 85, 94 resurgent, 12, 13, 20, 21, 24–26, 28, 30, 37, 92, 94, 103–106, 110, 113 Space (outer), 111 colonisation of, 111 Spain, 32, 60, 76–78, 80, 81, 84–86, 88 Southern border, 76, 78–80, 86, 87, 95 SPD (National Socialists), Czech Republic, 34 State, interiorisation function of, 92 Subjectivity (human), 110 ‘subject effects’, 5, 112 Surveillance, 8, 24, 76, 82, 88, 93, 95 T Technocracy, 34 The Epic of Gilgamesh, 112 The New Accelerator (novel by H.G. Wells), 111

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U United Kingdom, 25 United Nations, 49, 54–57 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 45, 60 World Drug Reports , 45, 60 United States, 7, 25, 50, 60, 61, 65 Uruguay, 50, 61, 62, 65

V Valencia, 78 Vancouver, 24 Velvet Revolution (1989), Czech Republic, 28, 29 Vital politics, 2, 9–11, 14, 104, 110 Voboˇril, Jindˇrich, 32, 35–37

W War on drugs, 21, 22, 25, 35 West African route (drug traffic), 78 World Health Organisation (WHO), 55, 58, 60, 63–65

Z Zeman, Miloš, 36