The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line

Description

The War on Drugs has led to millions of people dead, displaced and incarcerated. Disproportionately enforced on oppressed races, international drug prohibition has reinforced the colour line across the globe.



While laws prohibiting the production, sale and use of particular drugs are presented as politically neutral and objective, this collection reveals the racist impact of the War on Drugs across multiple continents and in numerous situations. From racialised drugs policing at festivals in the UK to the necropolitical wars in Juarez, Mexico and from the exchange of drug policing programs between the United States and Israel to the management of black bodies in Brazil, this collection proves that the regulation of drugs and race is an international, and intentional, disaster.



Pushing forward the debate and activism led by groups such as Black Lives Matter and calling for radical changes in drug policy legislation and prison reform, both nationally and internationally, this collection cuts deep and rings true for all people fighting racism today.

Acknowledgements

Introduction - Kojo Koram

1. Benevolent whiteness in Canadian drug regulation - Elise Wohlbold and Dawn Moore

2. Policing the ‘Black party’: racialized drugs policing at festivals in the UK - Tanzil Chowdhury

3. Racism and drug policy: criminal control and the management of Black bodies by the Brazilian state - Evandro Piza Duarte and Felipe da Silva Freitas

4. Necropolitical wars - Ariadna Estévez

5. The apotheosis of war in Colombia - Oscar Guardiola-Rivera and Kojo Koram

6. A people’s history of police exchanges: settler colonialism, capitalism and the intersectionality of struggles - Ashley Bohrer and Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

7. Perpetuating apartheid: South African drug policy - Shaun Shelly and Simon Howell

8. Racism and social injustice in War on Drugs narratives in Indonesia - Asmin Fransiska

9. Colonial roots of the global pandemic of untreated pain - Katherine Pettus

Notes on contributors

Index

Sujets

• Frantz Fanon
• Discrimination
• Human Rights
• Social Science
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Franz Fanon
• 21st century
• International human rights law
• LAW
• International

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 mars 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781786804099
• Langue: English

Extrait

The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line
The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line
Edited by Kojo Koram
First published 2019 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Kojo Koram 2019
The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3882 8 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3880 4 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0408 2 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0410 5 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0409 9 EPUB eBook



This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Swales Willis
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
For Yaara
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Kojo Koram
1 Benevolent whiteness in Canadian drug regulation
Elise Wohlbold and Dawn Moore
2 Policing the Black party : racialized drugs policing at festivals in the UK
Tanzil Chowdhury
3 Racism and drug policy: criminal control and the management of Black bodies by the Brazilian state
Evandro Piza Duarte and Felipe da Silva Freitas
4 Necropolitical wars
Ariadna Est vez
5 The apotheosis of war in Colombia
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera and Kojo Koram
6 A people s history of police exchanges: settler colonialism, capitalism and the intersectionality of struggles
Ashley Bohrer and Andr s Fabi n Henao Castro
7 Perpetuating apartheid: South African drug policy
Shaun Shelly and Simon Howell
8 Racism and social injustice in War on Drugs narratives in Indonesia
Asmin Fransiska
9 Colonial roots of the global pandemic of untreated pain
Katherine Pettus
Notes on contributors
Index
Acknowledgements
This book is the product of a series of workshops focused on critical approaches to drug policy held at the University of Essex between 2017-2018. The first workshop was sponsored by the Open Society Foundation and the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy, who both deserve my unending gratitude for supporting this project in its fledging stages. I am deeply indebted to Dr Nayeli Urquiza Haas, my co-conspirator in organising the first conference and a source of endless inspiration for the project as a whole. Also, my heartfelt thanks is extended to Julie Hannah, the Co-Director of the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy, who has been a constant champion of the project and supported us at every turn.
From that initial meeting, I was fortunate to assemble an exciting collection of authors to collaborate on further workshops, including one focusing specifically on race and drug policy. These workshops resulted in the writing of this book. I owe a deep thanks to all of my contributors for being willing to lend their insights to my project in such fascinating ways. It was a real privilege to have curated such an exciting group of authors.
In guiding the book to publication, I was lucky to receive the support of David Shulman and everyone at Pluto Press. Finally, this book would not be possible without the support of my partner, Kim Simpson and the inspiration of my daughter Yaara whose impromptu arrival coincided with my submission deadline, meaning the final drafts of this book were written with one hand whilst carrying a sleeping baby with the other. It is to you, Yaara, that this book is dedicated and hopefully by the time you are old enough to read it, the world will be a different world from the one we describe here.
Introduction
Kojo Koram
In 1903, canonical African-American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois famously declared that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour-line. 1 In the nineteenth century, the age of empires reached its apex as European colonial powers competed with each other to control more and more of the globe s resources and territory. A racial logic underpinned the European empires behaviour to a greater or lesser extent, with scientific racism giving rise to an idea of a fixed hierarchy between peoples of different skin colour, which could subsequently be used to justify White Europeans claiming dominion over the earth. However, with the twentieth century bringing with it increasing internal crisis within this imperial world order, the age of empires would collapse into global warfare shortly after the turn of the century. In anticipation of this decline of the world of empires, Du Bois correctly recognized that any vision of a new, more universal international order would have to address the question of the colour line that had been drawn across the globe by European imperialism and that in many countries - South Africa, Australia and of course Du Bois s own United States of America, for example - was explicitly enshrined in law. And yet, despite Du Bois s haunting premonition, by the mid-twentieth century, with the victories of civil rights and decolonization as well as the wider cultural shift away from the accepted norms of scientific racism, the problem of the colour line appeared to have been solved, or at least be set upon a historical trajectory that would lead to it to being solved by the turn of the new millennium.
Now writing from within that new millennium, the idea that the problem of the colour line was effectively concluded with the end of formal colonialism and segregation holds little water. While both the letter of the law and wider cultural discourse disavow racial categorizations, empirical research continues to reveal deep divisions in terms of the treatment of people persisting to operate along racial lines. 2 This provokes the question of where are the arenas in which racial division is produced if now discredited by formal law? This book responds to this question by focusing on the late twentieth-century War on Drugs - by which we refer to the internationally and domestically enforced prohibition of illegal intoxicants - as a contemporary arena in which difference in racialized subjectivity and experiences continue to be produced.
The argument that the drug laws aid in the production and persistence of a colour line challenges the objective ground upon which these laws draw their authority. The laws that prohibit the production, sale and possession of particular drugs are presumed as being politically neutral and grounded in an objective assessment of harm. The United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961 (hereafter referred to as the Single Convention), the UN treaty that serves as the bedrock for the current system of international drug prohibition, claims that the prohibition of drugs will prevent social and economic danger for mankind as a whole. 3 However, in the decades of international drug prohibition that have followed, the result of prohibition is primarily untold millions of people being left dead, displaced and/or incarcerated across the world, without producing the targeted drop in the trade of drugs. Furthermore, this suffering has not been endured universally, but instead has been disproportionally borne by specific groups of people, often groups that were already historically oppressed through the preceding racial and colonial organization of the globe. However, while there has been much scholarship and public debate over the past decade that has analysed how the War on Drugs has fuelled a racist system of mass incarceration and state violence in the US, work that shows that this dynamic has also been reproduced right across the world remains underdeveloped. This collection of essays brings together the work of various scholars and policy experts concerned with drugs and race in order to offer an innovative interrogation of the racist impact of the War on Drugs across multiple continents.
The War on Drugs
What was the twentieth-century invention that is commonly referred to as the War on Drugs ? Global drug prohibition originated in the twentieth century as a fringe concern of a few religious missionaries and anti-vice moralists and ended the century as an established international legal norm, backed by a global system of militarized enforcement, at the centre of a worldwide network of police power and prison systems. How was such a transformation produced? In a world in which global consensus often appears impossible, drug prohibition could initially appear as a rare example of a recognized universal legal project. Despite the plethora of different traditional and ritualistic uses of what we now term drugs that have long existed across the globe, the Single Convention commands an unusually high level of compliance amongst the nations of the world: 184 of the 193 members of the United Nations became signatories, while the few non-signatories still tend to follow the demands of the convention. 4 Drug prohibition has generally overridden the protections offered to cultural or customary practices by international human rights law that could be claimed in relation to coca-leaf chewing in the indigenous communities of the Andes or the traditional consumption of khat by Arab and North African societies. 5 In order for the Single Convention to protect this imagined global mankind , what was legislated was co-ordinated and universal action which would allow the law to enforce the prohibition of these substances across borders and eventually produce the eradication of their illegitimate use. 6 However the material consequences of international drug prohibition betray some major discontinuities between the humanism and universalism projected by international law and the unequal impact of drug prohibition across the world. The laws prohibiting drugs are supposed to be politically neutral and