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

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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 4151 Park Heights Avenue, Suite 207, Baltimore, MD 21215 • www.lbsbaltimore.com • (410) 374-7683
from the outside, Baudrillard shows us how the ‘evil’ is instead a consequence of the very logic of the system, of the excessive logic and rationality of a system – in this case society in the Industrialized countries – which, having reached a certain level of saturation, secretes antibodies which express its internal diseases, its strange malfunctions, its unforeseeable and incurable breakdowns. Within the discourse of European modernity, where the social relations between subjects is presumed to be fully secularized and consequently solely mediated through mutual recognition of each other’s humanity, the fear has been that ‘drug use threatens the social bond’ and summons up the spectre of the sub-human that persists within.” (Karam, 2019). The implications of this theory cannot be overstated. If Karam is correct, then many in society don’t see incarceration of drug users as a waste of tax revenue, but rather as productive investment in societal stability. Excluding the drug user from the realm of the rational precludes analysis of “evidence-based” drug treatment from being seen as a productive alternative to incarceration; addicts are not seen as sensible individuals capable of taking advantage of new services, but their addiction itself is seen as excluding them from the community of the rational. Ironically, this obsession with rationality is in itself irrational, suffused with racialized assumption around the Black/Brown others fundamental irrationality being expressed through intoxication. The racial disparities of the War on Drugs are not a “bug” in the criminal legal system, they very much are a feature, where Black and Brown drug users are seen as needing to be contained, lest their deviant cultural traits spread to the broader white community. Some would counter that the recent turn in research toward more compassionate views of drug users refutes Karam’s analysis. Here it is essential to remember Schiele’s discussions around the importance of thinking in diunital, rather than dichotomous patterns. Indeed, many have viewed the increasing interest in “public health” approaches to addictions as explicitly reflective of a racialized trend in addiction treatment, with the rise of opioid addiction in white communities being seen as the impetus for this shift. Netherland and Hansen argue it is an explicitly racialized fear of “wasted whiteness” with the contagion of addiction impugning white subjects' ability to productive neoliberal citizens as responsible for this shift. That explicitly notes a romanticized view of Whites in Appalachian Maryland as worthy of compassion because of their “hard lives of manual labor.” The ideological justification behind this shift makes their analysis particularly crucial for this project, as they write: “...Alcoff, for instance, argues that “White supremacy is itself incoherent and can manifest itself quite differently depending on historical periods and social groups” (2015: 15). Representations of drugs and the people who use them are influenced by the complex 4151 Park Heights Avenue, Suite 207, Baltimore, MD 21215 • www.lbsbaltimore.com • (410) 374-7683
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Chapman, Chris, and A. J. Withers.
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Moynihan , Daniel Patrick. “(1965
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Schiele, Jerome H. Human Services a
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Drug Decriminalization in Maryland Through an African Centered Research Paradigm- Analysis and Recommendations

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