A War on People. Jarrett Zigon
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and legislation and that is located in some fixed place like “isolated drug wars” in Mexico and Colombia or “isolated drug addicts” in American inner cities. Rather, this poem reveals that the drug war is a complex assembled phenomenon that manifests situationally and is constituted by aspects of other assemblages such as global militarism, state-based surveillance and control, border security, carceral political economics, biopolitical therapeutics, and international and national inequalities.
Through this disclosure we also see how the concept of situation opens analytic possibilities that allow us to move between located manifestations and the widely diffused phenomena that provide the conditions for this emergence. In other words, a critical hermeneutic reading of Bud’s poem discloses how the situation he found himself in along a California highway can only be understood as one local manifestation of a widely diffused assemblage that potentially can be distributed differentially and localized anywhere. Beginning from the entrée Bud’s poem provides, then, in the rest of this section, I trace multiple aspects of the drug war as revealed in the poem and do so through various ethnographic knots that have emerged from my ongoing assemblic ethnography. What I hope becomes clear is that the local emergences that Bud’s poem and the ethnographic knots depict—or what some might call the drug war reterritorialization—can never be preknown in terms of their location, form, affect, or temporality; nevertheless, they reveal a range of possibilities provided by a globally diffused, shared condition that becomes differentially distributed. I begin by reproducing the transcript of his reading in full:
Hitchhiking from Los Angeles to San Francisco, I stand in front of a highway sign. “No hitchhiking beyond this point.” So I am legal, and the traffic is heavy. Two police cars pull in front of me. A short cop wears a big grin. The other cop is tall and grim. I assume they just wanna check my identification, but the first thing the short cop says is: “from the other side of the road I didn’t know whether to come over here and jump you or rape you.” I freeze, silent and wary. “Take everything out of your pockets.” I put some change and cigarettes on the hood of his car. I reach to pull a book out of an inside coat pocket. Both cops pull their guns and aim them at me. The tall police says, “what’s this?” as though he has never seen a book before. The short glowing cop tells me, “we can take you out in the desert and shoot you and no one would ever know.” I remain speechless, as if any word I speak has very thin ice across it. They sort through a small traveling bag I have with me, and the short cop says, “what if I find some drugs?” I tell ‘em, “I don’t have any.” The short cop replies, “but what if I find some?” “Well” I say, “there isn’t any.” “Yeah”, the cop presses on, “but what if I find some?” I finally get the message. The cop’s liable to magically materialize drugs where none previously existed. The tall cop pulls a notebook out of the bag, they read a couple of pages of poems and laugh out loud, and one of them snaps the binding and pages flutter and float and are blown away by onrushing traffic. Next they each examine my cigarettes and break them into pieces. The short cop says, “get in the car. We’re going to have to strip you bare-ass naked.” I’m shoved into the front seat between the two cops. The beaming big-bellied cop grabs my long hair around his fist, slams my head against the steering wheel. The other cop hauls my pants down to my ankles. He forces a slender metal flashlight up my ass. It hurts. The fat cop says, “nothing huh?” The other one shakes his head. He gets out of the car. The engine starts. The cop tells me “to never come back to [name of place inaudible] and get that shit off the hood of my car or I’m gonna take it with me.” I leap from the police car, grab my pants with one hand; sweep my wreckage off the hood with my other hand. The squad cars roar away, spitting gravel into my face. A steady stream of staring faces passes me. I finally fasten my pants and cover my genitals. I gather what I can from the ground. I look up at the blank blue sky. The longing shredded, threatened with execution, raped, reduced to nothingness. The drug war.17
Reduced to nothingness, indeed. But, in fact, Bud and the many drug users I have met and come to know are already reduced to nothingness prior to such encounters. As I have been told in the various places my assemblic ethnography of the drug war has taken me and as I will explore in more detail in the next chapter, drug users all around the globe are considered, for example, to be “rubbish,” “waste,” and “shit.” For within the conditions of the drug war, drug users do not count as a recognizable part of whatever it is one feels a part of—society, culture, nation, family, or whatever. This is normally what drug user agonists and social scientists call stigma. But this is more than stigma. It is exactly what Bud calls it: a reduction to nothingness. It is this nothingness, this nonbeing, that provides the possibility not only for the police violence Bud experiences but also for the lack of care from those who stare at Bud as they pass him standing pantsless on the side of the highway.
As Giorgio Agamben recognizes with his concept of bare life, this nothingness has affect as the double move of inclusive exclusion.18 For it is as the nothingness in the midst of something—the drug user on a busy highway, the drug user in a city park, or as I’ve heard about and witnessed many times, the drug user in a hospital—that this nothingness has affect in the world. Indeed, it is partially by means of such nothingness that worlds are constituted. In this sense, the drug war situations that render drug users nothing in the midst of everything partially constitute the various worlds we ourselves inhabit. Worlds, that is, that are partially conditioned by the widely diffused phenomenon of the drug war with its differentially distributed situated affects.
Police officers raping and torturing persons on the sides of American highways may be a relatively rare local manifestation of the drug war (although not nearly as rare as the reader might think).19 But as I have been told several times while doing research with user agonists in Denpasar, Indonesia, it is a fairly frequent occurrence in Indonesian police stations.20 The vast majority of these occurrences never become public, but such stories circulate widely among drug users, who all seem to have had such experiences or know someone who has. One such occurrence that did become public through media exposure was that undergone by Merry Christina, who was raped by police officers for five days in a Jakarta police station, as her boyfriend was in the next room being tortured.21 After having been arrested while shooting heroin in a South Jakarta slum, Merry was given the choice to either be charged for heroin possession and use—a charge that could have resulted in a fifteen-year prison term for each of them—or to “sexually service” the police officers and be released without charge and with their drugs. It is common knowledge among drug users in Indonesia that this “choice” is regularly offered to women users and that men and women alike can expect a variety of tortures from beatings, to cigarette burns, to electrocution. Often the only hope of escaping this rape and torture is through bribery payments in an amount that is generally well beyond what might be readily available to most drug users. These police tactics of the rape, torture, and extortion of drug users have become common practice around the globe and constitute a significant aspect of the widely distributed conditions for the being-in-the-world of drug users everywhere.22
Another common threat made by Indonesian police meant to extort a bribe for users is that they will charge a drug user with trafficking if they do not pay. Indonesia today is one of the few countries left in the world where drug traffickers are put to death, and visitors are warned of this fact on their visas, where it can be read that the “death penalty for drug traffickers” can be instituted “under Indonesian law.” Indeed, just a few weeks prior to this writing, Indonesia put six persons to death,23 five of whom were foreign nationals. Widespread international and national pleas by anti–drug war agonists and their allies to have these sentences commuted fell on deaf ears as the Indonesian government continues to implement what it calls “shock therapy” in its attempt to deter drug trafficking. Indeed, openly practiced extreme violence has been a central aspect of the drug war waged in Indonesia for some time. Thus, for example, Joey, one of the founders of a Denpasar syringe exchange and a member of the city’s user union, told me that once when they were protesting against the illegality of harm-reduction practices and the kinds of violence the police often use to enforce these restrictions, riot police attacked their peaceful demonstration and broke it up with batons and tear gas. As a result of this police attack, Joey spent over a month in the hospital with a shattered skull. Such brutality toward drug users thus is not uncommon in Indonesia and occurs