Drug Decriminalization in Maryland Through an African Centered Research Paradigm- Analysis and Recommendations

decide how to use them for themselves. While the Human Rights Watch would seem to affirm a
more positive view of freedom discussing the denial of critical social services, it does not establish
a positive right to be free from hunger, poverty, or miseducation. It merely suggests inclusion into
existing institutions which themselves are woefully inadequate. This is a critical bit of ideological
work, where even the ostensibly radical position of decriminalizing drugs ultimately affirms the
right of individuals to not have drug use exclude them from the current political order. But it fails
to inherently seek to challenge the existing order. It furthers an inability to create conditions of
positive freedom, human rights, and self-determination for oppressed individuals and
communities.
Finally, the core assumption behind the narrative on the harm of the War on Drugs assumes
that the reader will be able to use a rational, objective critique of the excesses of hyper incarceration
to make political change. This implies that the core assumptions guiding the construction of the
contemporary War on Drugs are a rational desire to address the perceived dangers of drug use,
which has simply spiraled out of control due to the ignorance of voters and lawmakers. Scholars
of the War on Drugs challenge this notion, explaining that it is not merely that the War on Drugs
was inaugurated and supported by racist assumptions, but rather that drugs serve a critical social
function at the core of affirming the very civilization project of the West. In a Western society
which prioritizes rational as the condition of possibility for the community, scholars have argued
that the fear of drug intoxication reflects a concern of the “rational” west reverting society to a
violent “state of nature,” with irrational, racialized “others'' threatening the very fabric of civilized
society. This concept fundamentally challenges much of the assumptive logic of the research on
the War on Drugs and drug decriminalization. It will be foundational in setting racism and antiblackness
at the core of this paper’s subsequent finding. Birkbeck School of Law professor Kojo
Karam is quoted at length in attempting to provide context for this argument:
“To appreciate the social function of the concept of drugs helps us to understand the moral
panic that they engender and why their prohibition often takes the form of reinforcing the
old colour line now ostensibly discredited within liberal political discourse. Drugs are not
seen as mere plant life in the manner that they appear in nature, nor are they seen as
commodities, as natural resources to be exploited for capitalist gain. Drugs are instead
discursively produced as ‘transgressive substances’, elements of the natural world that can
call upon the negation of the characteristics that define ‘humanity’. As Desmond
Manderson argues, the fear of drugs is not merely the fear of the substances themselves;
rather, ‘what lies beneath is undoubtedly a fear of contamination’, a fear of the failed state
of humanity they are commonly read as bringing about. Drugs are taken to facilitate
movement between different states of being, transferring consumers from the realm of the
human to the non- human. The contemporary conceptualization of drugs takes much from
the classical notion of pharmakon, which Derrida recovers to describe the discursive
process for how difference is produced. The pharmakon facilitates ‘the movement and the
play … (soul/body, good/evil, inside/outside, memory/forgetfulness, speech/writing, etc.)’
threatening any notion of ‘internal purity and security’ within a social order. Furthermore,
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