Illegal drugs have seldom been as good and as cheap as they are these days. Legal drugs, however, are rapidly becoming more expensive owing to constantly increasing tax, and now have a huge influence on the rate of price increases and inflation. Price-conscious drug users are thus systematically driven away from Provigil® and alcopops towards Special K, speed or blotters, where they simply get more for their money. Instead of the medicine for which they have to pay an ever-increasing amount at the chemist’s, they turn instead to alternatives and copies.

But the legalizers are a threat to these consumers on the offensive. An amazingly broad coalition has gathered behind the »Legalize it« banner; almost any regional politician who is at all liberal and enlightened will surreptitiously tell you how everyone knows that the only way forward is to legalize drugs. Left-wingers like the veteran propagandist of legalization, Günther Amendt, are now quoted benevolently in newspapers like the »Financial Times«. For it is obvious that, on a liberalized market, drugs must also be free of restrictions. What kind of freedom is meant is a question of the interests involved and of misunderstandings. Conservatives hope that legalization will improve domestic security and create growth industries. Liberals want to strengthen the autonomy of the citizens. Everyone is to know what is good for them and what is harmful. And it is easier to deny drug users who buy their drugs from a licensed dealer their right to insurance. Employers in their turn expect more productive employees. Pharmaceutical manufacturers hope for new products and better protection for their patents. And the greenies will be victorious on one more front against the environmental terrorists when the nasty residues left over from the manufacture of Ecstasy can at last be disposed of legally in the cyclic economy instead of polluting Dutch ground water. Drugs could be great for almost everyone; why were we against them for so long?

Drugs have long been part of value creation, and in a variety of ways. But for a long time – at least in the case of intoxicants – they conflicted with the idea of a respectable life based on work, in which the disciplinary society kept its members in line with the cudgel of morality. It was alright to take drugs to keep up your own working capacity, but it was only acceptable to use them to get intoxicated as long as that working capacity was maintained. Now, working capacity no longer has to be maintained, as there is too much of it around.

Owing to this recent change of paradigm, drug consumption now barely represents a moral problem that needs to be disciplined by the relevant authorities of a society. Rather, the methods of preserving and enhancing working capacity, and thus drugs as well, are becoming articles whose value is on the up. In the neo-liberal world, as we know, people are to work as autonomous individuals. These »entrepreneurs of themselves« are granted the right of disposal over their physical and mental capital, and can use it to try out short-term or long-term investment strategies. This makes the decision to take drugs a matter of discretion for each individual »speculator«.

Christiane F., the child from Bahnhof Zoo, has already taught children all over the world that drug addicts can earn as much as a factory director even as adolescents. The public image of drug users has now almost completely departed from the idea that they are emaciated people who sell their household goods. Now, the idea of the druggie as a high achiever is being propagated. This can be seen in the updated version of the story about the »fallen« Christiane that Jörg Böckem recently wrote and published. Böckem, a journalist, tells his own life story as a junkie at Hamburg’s Central Station who earns his livelihood writing for the weekly »Der Spiegel« instead of as a rent boy. In »Lass mich die Nacht überleben« (Let Me Survive the Night), his hero, Jörg, manages to finance his drug habit with respectably taxed euros day in, day out. As well as achieving considerable economic feats, he also takes another hurdle of late-modern working life: he fulfils himself: »I did what I always wanted to do.« The idea is interesting, but there are questions left unanswered: How can the long-term ill effects that drug-takers may inflict upon themselves stay with them and not be transferred to society? How can the transparency of money transactions that is necessary for maintaining order in a control society be produced within such a diffuse structure as today’s illegal drug trade? And how is the pharmaceutical market to regulate the production rights for these attractive products?

Looked at objectively, drugs are simply substances that put themselves in relation to the body and mind through the metabolism. Depending on the dose and the form in which they are taken, the same substances can trigger very different psychological and physical reactions. It is the social context in which the drug is being used that largely decides how these reactions are judged. Up until the second industrial revolution, the manufacture of drugs was part of the confidential knowledge that a small elite, at first made up of people calling themselves magicians or witches, then of doctors, passed around among itself. Access to this elite was regulated, but its actions were barely controlled. From 1883 technical procedures, and thus drugs, were increasingly subject to patents. The exclusivity of the knowledge about the respective methods or the access to their formulae (which, today, we can see as codes, both metaphorically and mostly also practically, as almost all methods can now be recorded digitally) was formalized. This knowledge now belongs to companies, some of which were called Eli Lilly & Co™, SmithKline (now GalaxoSmithKline™) or Ernst Merck™ even in those days. The administrators and middlemen of these methods were doctors and chemists, who distributed the new technologies among the consumers in small units.

The criminalization of the non-medical use of drugs, which meant a strengthening of the monopoly on their distribution, began shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. The Harrison Narcotic Tax Act of 1914 was the first US law to make the non-medical use of drugs a punishable offence. This regulatory measure was introduced as the result of a war: at the end of the military conflict with Spain over the control of Cuba, the Philippines also fell to the victorious USA. Because this East Asian island state played a central role in the opium trade, the USA found itself under international pressure to take up a stance on drugs. It organized the first international opium conference in 1912 in The Hague, laying the foundations for an international drug legislation from which the Harrison Narcotic Tax Act emerged. As the word »tax« in the name of the law suggests, this act was concerned with imposing more effective taxes on drugs and with drying up economies where the colonial master did not earn anything.

Another of the law’s aims was difficult to overlook: the argumentation in favour of the law had too heavy-handedly employed the image of the »Negro cocainist«. This enigmatic figure was used in a farcical tale of how in every seemingly harmless-looking Uncle Tom there slumbered a dangerous savage whom drugs would unleash and make carry out all kinds of crimes. This unfounded, yet tenacious, cock-and-bull story concealed the desire for more effective control over the black ghettos. In summary, one can say that the first modern drug law – the foundation of the later »War on Drugs« - was born of a predicament of late colonialism, and was a measure linked to the restructuring of labour: to be more exact, the shift from slavery to paid labour.

The main consequence of the Harrison Narcotic Tax Act was a price increase. Cocaine became an exclusive drug. From then on, the lower classes had to make do with other substances. Even the makers of the law must have realized that international policies involving drug prohibition were imaginary solutions from the start: these were situations that could not be eliminated by bans. In the end, over the years, the regulation led to a self-organizing deregulation. In large cities, a black economy came into being in which drugs circulated outside the controlled market. And at every further tightening of laws intended to stop the non-medical use of drugs, this grey market experienced a vigorous upturn.

But this system functioned more or less until, at the end of the sixties, there was a huge jump in sales in the uncontrolled zone, while, at the same time, the industrial societies entered a phase of radical transformation. And something else had happened as well: some chemists began, outside the international patent law, to crack the codes of drugs and to produce imitations, quasi pirate copies. This soon led to a relatively uncontrolled parallel economy for synthetic drugs. This early generation of bio-tech hackers formed a plateau upon which later patent pirates and certain practices of the generic-drug manufacturers could build.

Gripped by a certain panic in the face of these developments, the US president Richard Nixon declared the illegal use of drugs, their so-called abuse, the Public Enemy No. 1. The Nixon administration meant this enmity quite literally, as, from now on, the USA waged war on non-licensed drug users, dealers and manufacturers. And, again, it was a war against the consequences of war: the conflict had escalated when GIs in Vietnam came into contact with heroin on a massive scale, often returning from the front as addicts. To put it another way, an incalculable quantity, something almost like a virus – to reflect the love technicians have for biological metaphors – infiltrated the pharmaceutical structures of the US market.

From the very beginning, the »War on Drugs« was used to reorganize the methods of social control. At this time, it became possible to foresee that industrial labour would be followed by another model at the centre of value creation. Paid labour organized around the factory, and the tools of social control associated with it, were soon no longer to have any relevance for a large part of society. The »War on Drugs«, offering as it did many different ways to intrude upon the private sphere and to address the individual, provided a set of tools that seemed to give a means of control over the scattering manpower in a phase of transition. In addition, the USA soon began to use the war against drugs as a Trojan horse for geopolitical interests – for open, ex-territorial militarization – by sheer coincidence, several months after the Iron Curtain came down. »Operation Just Cause« against the military dictator Manuel Noriega in Panama, who had fallen out of favour, was declared to be a military intervention against the »patrons of the international drug trade«.

In the nineties, following the dissolution of the East-West system, supply and demand underwent a massive shift towards synthetic drugs. One of the causes of this went far back into the days of the Cold War. During its heated phase, Khrushchev once coined a parodistic version of one of Lenin’s statements: »Communism is the power of the Soviets plus the chemicalization of the economy.« The collapse of the Soviet Union left a host of chemists, excellently trained but now unemployed, who were force to look around for new fields of activity. Although it was at first Western industrialists who converted pharmaceutical factories in the informal space in the East to manufacture Ecstasy, over the years new local contexts arose. In Poland, for example, a whole parallel industry has grown up that is now one of the big providers of illegal synthetic drugs.

From today’s point of view, the »War on Drugs« would seem to have failed, and the needs have changed completely as well. One of the great insights gained from this war is that military measures cannot eliminate either the desire for intoxication or the use of drugs. The fact that its end is not yet in sight despite this suggests that the tools developed during it could serve in future to maintain the distribution of property with regard to bio-technologies, particularly copied pharmaceutical products.

The annual report of the International Narcotics Control Board, a subsidiary body of the United Nations based in Vienna, points in this direction. The report, published in March 2004, deplores the illegal Internet trade with controlled drugs from Pakistan, Thailand and India. By sheer coincidence, these countries are a thorn in the flesh of the big pharmaceutical concerns, because, on the one hand, pharmaceutical patents are bypassed in a big way there and, on the other, a prosperous and legal generic drug industry has grown up in India in the past few years. In the face of this coincidence, the outrage of the Addiction Council that »even Ritalin®« is being distributed in this way is a matter for amazement. This bone of contention, whose manufacturing rights are owned by the pharmaceutical company Novartis™ in Switzerland, is a blockbuster drug, used in child and youth psychiatry, that has been booming legally for years and is very easy to obtain owing to the wide range of cases in which its use is indicated. In the end, it becomes clear that the Control Council is mainly concerned with the fact that »international cooperation between criminal prosecutors and customs authorities must be extended.«

In addition to this, the board demands strict controls on the branching off of preliminary stages in the manufacture of synthetic drugs. Just as in the area of digital technology, where software and content can only be permanently protected as property from the technological possibility of copying to a limited extent, the attempt is constantly made to control pharmaceutical procedures through the hardware. For the formulae have, of course, long been public knowledge. What seemed a few years ago to be a skirmish between criminal elements and companies with rights is now increasingly growing into a massive conflict in which the evil drug manufacturers and copiers are based, extremely favourably from a geo-political point of view, in Burma, North Korea and China, or annoyingly out of place in Holland.

The legalization of drugs I mentioned at the start of this article mostly aims in the end at the clear assignment of property, particularly with regard to the formulae of their manufacture. For the consumption of drugs is sort of OK now - provided they aren’t bought from the wrong people.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

---