A War on People. Jarrett Zigon
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front of the world as the government continues its shock therapy of executions.
Recently, the Indonesian government has attempted to “soften” its stance on drug users by offering them the possibility of registering as drug users. This form of self-disclosure, or self-imposed surveillance, is considered a lenient approach because if (or does the registration turn this if into a when?) the registered user is someday arrested for use/possession, then he or she will be sent to rehabilitation instead of prison. No doubt most users would prefer rehabilitation over prison, but the very idea of rehabilitation is increasingly recognized by the anti–drug war movement as questionable at best and at worst potentially life-threatening. By tracing the assemblic relations of biopolitical therapeutics to, for example, Russia and then Denmark, we can consider these potentially life-threatening effects of abstinence-based rehabilitation.
Consider, for example, Andrei, who was found dead by his mother in their Saint Petersburg apartment. His mouth full of his own vomit, Andrei had overdosed on heroin soon after returning home from an abstinence-based rehabilitation center run by the Russian Orthodox Church.24 As they say, “heroin can wait,” and when Andrei could no longer avoid the lingering patience of heroin, he experienced an unfortunately fairly common effect of reacquaintance with the drug, an overdose. It is well known that a significant number of heroin overdoses occur when those attempting abstinence-based rehabilitation begin to use again. This startling fact is the result of the oftentimes fatal combination of such phenomena as the loss of tolerance, the enthusiasm to use again, the lack of knowledge of the potency of the specific heroin bought this time—a lack that can at least be mitigated by maintaining a relationship, which is often broken when abstinence rehabilitation is attempted, with a regular dealer—and likely solitary use because of the isolating combination of shame, guilt, and a possible loss of former using networks. This correlative fact of overdose after attempts at abstinence, combined with the overwhelming failure of abstinence-based rehabilitation programs (the failure rate of twelve-step programs is 90–95 percent),25 suggests that the biopolitical-therapeutic aspect is one of the most fatally dangerous aspects of the drug war.26
Lone, a user agonist in Copenhagen, has been trying to communicate this danger to the Danish government and public for several years. In Denmark, Narcotics Anonymous and other such abstinence-based programs comprise over 90 percent of the available drug rehabilitation/therapy programs. And just as Andrei was limited in his options for rehabilitation to a church-run abstinence program because very few other options exist in Russia, so too in Copenhagen Lone’s husband, Nils, had no other option but an abstinence-based program when he decided to try to stop his regular heroin use. Although he did not feel that he needed to completely stop his drug use, Nils did know that to be the kind of husband and father he wanted to be he needed to significantly limit his use. But unfortunately, the very concept of a recreational use–based rehab program does not exist, and therefore when Nils wanted some help with his heroin use, he had to go all in, as it were. Abstinence or nothing, and in this case, as with Andrei and so many more, it turned out to be abstinence and death. Just like Andrei, Nils could not—in part because he actually never wanted to—remain abstinent. And when he used again—having bought some heroin from a dealer he did not know—he happened to inject an unusually potent fix and died. By all accounts Nils was a good husband and father and wanted to become a better one. But in the limitations of drug war situations, within which abstinence is the only “legitimate” therapeutic alternative to the abjection of drug use, Nils had his possibilities limited—not entirely but significantly—to becoming just another casualty of the drug war.
One thing that does not have its possibilities for becoming limited by the conditions of the drug war is heroin. Drug war propaganda creates the imaginary that drugs are dangerous substances in and of themselves. Heroin, for instance, is represented as a singular substance that has naturally negative effects because of its self-same attributes. Nothing could be further from the truth.27 Drug war situations provide the ontological conditions for the very being of heroin, and this being, in fact, is always becoming otherwise. Heroin in and of itself—a thing that is more or less impossible to find in the worlds of most users today—is not the cause of most of the substance-related harm that users experience, including that of overdose. Rather, most of this harm only exists because of the unknown and unknowable substance heroin has become that the user happens to be able to purchase. As the substance that we call heroin travels through the unregulated, informal, and underground drug market—from source, to trafficker, to dealer, to the next dealer, to the user—heroin becomes another substance as each person along this underground commodity chain attempts to stretch his or her inventory by cutting it with yet more contaminants. Once the user finally purchases the “heroin,” she has no idea what the purity of the substance is or what contaminants have been used in the cutting process. In other words, she actually has no idea what kind of entity she is about to inject. Only if the user has a good and long-lasting relationship with a dealer might she know what her dealer cut the substance with. But she will not know what it had been cut with prior to this dealer. It is precisely this uncertainty—nay, this impossibility of knowing precisely what substance, and its potency, that one is injecting—that oftentimes results in overdose.
Just as drug war situations affect the being of heroin, so too they affect the being of other objects. Syringes become deadly objects capable of delivering infectious diseases. They also become objects that signify to police officers that the person carrying the object may also be carrying heroin. Cigarette butts lying on sidewalks become sources of cotton that can act as filters as one prepares the heroin for injection. The dirt that may have been on that cigarette butt and now gets mixed with the substance just injected into one’s arm will likely contribute to the abscess that will appear there. A building where they give out syringes, cotton, sterile water, and other such works to help users avoid the open-ended and dangerous possibilities of the becoming of these found elsewhere has itself now become an object of interest for police. Police will now regularly watch this building, take note of who enters and leaves, and use this as an excuse to stop, question, and frisk those who do so. In the situations of the drug war, then, the being of all of these objects and more has become something entirely different than what it is in other situations. Situations, then, are also constituted by aspects of diverse nonhuman objects and affect and alter the being of those objects in turn.
The way in which the drug war situation turns certain buildings, streets, parks, and neighborhoods into objects of surveillance returns us along the assemblic relation of state-based surveillance and control back to Bud’s poem. After having traveled some way along the various assemblic relations disclosed in the poem, we can perhaps now come to see that although spectacularly disturbing, rape, torture, and other forms of police violence may not be the most insidious situated manifestation of the drug war revealed in Bud’s poem. For the intertwining of the carceral political-economic and the surveillance and control aspects of the drug war are most clearly disclosed in the very fact that the police stopped Bud in the first place. This is a variant of what has come to be called stop-and-frisk. Stop-and-frisk essentially means that police officers with so-called reasonable suspicion can stop any individual to question and frisk. This tactic, which initially aimed to get weapons off the streets, has morphed into a means of controlling and watching populations. As Terrance, a fifty-year-old African American man from the Bronx, a former crack user who has been incarcerated twice, and now a leader of VOCAL-NY, once told me: stop-and-frisk tactics make him feel as if “I’m trespassing in my own neighborhood.” He continued with a description of his experience with stop-and-frisk:
If I’m coming out of my building, like I been many times, and stopped and frisked because I’m a person of color and I don’t have my sneakers tied or I’m wearing, you know, or I have clothes on that are related to gangsters or whatever, which are the clothings that a lot of people in the neighborhood wear, you know, and I’m going to work and I’m still being stopped. And I got my bag and everything, my ID is out, you know, come on. You’re not giving me no freedom to walk in my own neighborhood, but if I was in another neighborhood, another color, you wouldn’t be stopping me. So why am I, at this point right here, being profiled?
Terrance’s question is one increasingly asked by African American and Latino American persons who are systematically watched by this and similar forms