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

unlike the nineteenth-century notion of scientific racism, drugs are not presumed to impact
only those who are afflicted; a key element to grasp in order to appreciate the fear that
underwrites drug prohibition is to understand that prohibitionists see a mimetic or
contagious power within drugs. The fear that drugs might consume the subject who
themselves sought to consume the drug is not only a fear of the damage drugs might cause
to that specific consumer but that this damage will spread amongst the other members of
the community. The fear of these drugs is that they threaten the stability of the social order
as a whole, functioning as what Stanley Cohen termed as the societal folk-devil, spreading
the addiction amongst the whole community. David Courtwright states that ‘absent the
idea of addiction, the whole system of controlling drug supply that has developed over the
last two centuries would make little moral or practical sense.’ I would add to this that an
understanding of the fear that drug addiction causes, and importantly spreads, the
denigration of an idealized figure of the human is necessary to understand why the drug
laws have persisted despite the devastation they have brought upon already oppressed
peoples. Early drug prohibition campaigns in the US at the start of the twentieth century
found much of their success through equating particular drugs with particular groups of
racial others – opium with Chinese labourers, marijuana with Mexican migrants, etc. The
US’s earliest recorded drug law, the 1875 City Ordinance Against Opium Dens passed in
San Francisco, was a law produced on ‘strictly ethnic grounds’, aimed against ‘Chinese
immigrants’ practice of smoking opium’ and fuelled by a popular media obsessed with
‘images of “yellow fiends” debauching white women and the youth of the nation’.
Particularly relevant is the way in which the threat of these drugs was seen as not merely
contained to the communities of the racial others, the real danger was how they could spill
out into White communities. In short, drugs as ‘transgressive substances’ are read as
having the power to transform even the most rational, autonomous, enlightened and
sovereign European ‘man’ into the lazy, violent, depraved figure of the sub-human. The
correlative response to this fear is the aim of expelling these ‘drugs’ from the collective
social order, along with those who might be addicted or particularly susceptible to an
addiction to these substances. The metaphysical quality read into drugs is easily
transferred into the very material bodies of those already traditionally constructed as being
a threat to the boundaries of humanity: racially othered populations.
Sociologist and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard adds a further element to this argument
with his own reading of how indebted the fear of ‘drugs’ is to a Weberian conception of
the economic and social good in western society. For Baudrillard, the West arrogates onto
itself a specific capacity for delayed gratification and it is this capacity taken to underlie
presumptions of civilization. The condemnation of drugs therefore functions as a stand-in
for the fear of the threat of the loss of that capacity for delayed gratification, the defeat of
reason and the will, at the hand of the appetite in Aristotelian terms. Baudrillard argues
that ‘traces of this long-standing condemnation linger on in our own vision of modern
drugs and of the occult power they derive from their ancient symbolic virtues.’ As opposed
to the ‘evil’ of drug addiction residing in the drug itself and infecting western modernity
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