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CHAPTER 1

The Drug War as Widely Diffused Complexity

Recent decades have seen an increasing complexity in the dynamics that impinge upon politics.

—Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams

What do certain military missions in Afghanistan, domestic spying in the United States, therapeutic interventions in Russia and Denmark, torture and rape in an Indonesian police station, and stop-and-frisk policing in New York City all have in common? The answer is that they are just a few of the local situated manifestations of the widely diffused phenomenon named the drug war. Having roots in the nineteenth century and gradually emerging throughout the twentieth, the drug war was officially “declared” in 1971 by Richard Nixon and only became a full-blown global war in the 1980s, when it became militarized and intertwined with the Cold War through initiatives of the Reagan and then Bush administrations. Today what is named the drug war is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths a year globally and the social and political “death” or exclusion of many more people.¹ But the drug war has potential effects that go well beyond these numbers. Whether by means of military interventions, policing and incarceration strategies, international and national surveillance, and the overblown budgets to pay for them or by means of biopolitical therapeutics, national and international legislation, and the normalization of labor regimes and discipline, all of which and more constitute aspects of the drug war, this is a war that potentially affects every human on the planet.²

How can the drug war have such widespread effects, and how do we conceptualize it? In this chapter and throughout this book, I hope to begin to offer an answer to this question. I will argue that the drug war should not be conceived as something like a singular policy issue or a totalized strategy, and neither should it be limited, as it often is in public discourse, to its localized manifestation in parts of Colombia, Mexico, or the inner cities of the United States. Rather, the drug war is best conceived as a nontotalizable and widely diffused complex phenomenon that manifests temporarily and locally as a situation. If the primary task of this book is to do a critical hermeneutics of the contemporary condition of war and the political possibilities the anti–drug war movement enact by addressing this condition, then a secondary, though still considerable, task is to show that the concept of a situation as a widely diffused phenomenon significantly adds to the anthropological conceptual apparatus. This is so because the concept of situation allows us to consider that which is widely diffused across different global scales as a nontotalizable assemblage yet in its occasional and temporary local manifestation allows us to understand how persons and objects that are geographically, socioeconomically, and “culturally” distributed get caught up in the shared conditions that emerge from a situation. Becoming “caught up” in the shared conditions of a situation, in turn, significantly affects the possible ways of being-in-the-world of those persons and objects that “get caught up.” The concept of situation, then, allows us analytically to recognize that in the current global configuration, complexity is at least as knotted nonlocally as it is locally, and thus, increasingly—so I contend—local complexity emerges within the shared conditions set by this diffused complexity.

Although they do not describe it quite like this, this is how those in the anti–drug war movement that I have been doing assemblic ethnography with view the drug war and their political activity. Anti–drug war politics is a politics of agonistic and creative experimentation with the otherwise, and as such it has had to define well what it is against and what it intends to transgress.³ Unlike many post-1968 political movements that self-define as addressing issues or identities that tend to be conceived as totalized, closed, and located,⁴ anti–drug war politics has defined its political agonist as a globally diffused phenomenon that locally manifests differentially and temporarily. Although there are some similarities between this and what is now known as intersectionality—most particularly in terms of recognizing the intertwining of various “factors” in the constitution of a phenomenon—intersectionality, nevertheless, assumes the existence of the same preconceived and totalized issues and identities—for example, class, race, and gender—as do other post-1968 approaches, even if these are now understood as “work[ing] together and influenc[ing] each other.”⁵ In contrast, the concept of a situation as the local and temporary manifestation of a widely diffused, complex phenomenon does not assume such preconceived and totalized issues and identities but rather articulates that these are themselves complex, emergent, and open phenomena that nevertheless provide the conditions for the being-in-the-world of those and that which have become caught up within them.

In this chapter and throughout this book, then, I would like to explore how what I have learned from the anti–drug war movement in terms of what those within it see themselves addressing, how they address it, and how they organize may help anthropologists, political theorists, and political agonists rethink their own objects of study. In so doing, I hope to go beyond a notion of globalization and the tracing of global connections across a closed and totalized globe, as Anna Tsing’s notion of friction could be read.⁶ Instead, I seek to explore how situations as widely diffused assembled phenomena that are differentially distributed participate in the ontological conditioning of our contemporary worlds and yet as assemblages always hold the potential to become otherwise.⁷ The drug war is one such phenomenon.

ASSEMBLIC ETHNOGRAPHY

The study of widely diffused assembled phenomena requires an ethnographic method and style of writing that I call assemblic ethnography. Assemblic ethnography as a method shares some similarities with multisited ethnography as George Marcus originally and schematically articulated it.⁸ But in practice and true to its name, most multisited research has tended to focus on a few, oftentimes prechosen, sites and the connections between them. In contrast, assemblic ethnography is a method of chasing and tracing a complex phenomenon through its continual process of assembling across different global scales and its temporally differential localization as situations in diverse places. Just as one never knows if, when, and where she or he will get caught up in a situation, so too the anthropologist doing assemblic ethnography can never know beforehand when and where the research will lead. For example, in 2006 I began research at an Orthodox-run rehabilitation program in Russia,⁹ during which I became attuned to the political struggle there for harm-reduction services. This led me to the central role of user unions in this struggle, which had been initially funded by the Open Society Foundation based in New York. While in New York researching this initiative, I became attuned to Voices of Community Activists and Leaders (VOCAL-NY),¹⁰ a local political organization dedicated to fighting the drug war and its pernicious consequences, and how they politically address their drug war situation, which, I came to learn, was partly informed by the successes in Vancouver, where I then went before going on to Copenhagen, Denpasar, and elsewhere.

Unlike the traditional ethnographer, then, the assemblic ethnographer realizes that research focused on any one site—and in practice, most multisited research as well—results in a decomplexification of the situation under study. This is so because the assemblic ethnographer recognizes that complexity is knotted nonlocally at least as much as it is locally. Perhaps most significantly, to do an assemblic ethnography is to recognize that this knotted complexity is the consequence of the temporary emergence of nontotalized assemblages, and thus a primary characteristic of this method is tracing the various assemblic relations that constitute the assemblage. Thus, my research did not simply move from one site to the next but rather moved along diverse assemblic relations of the drug war. For example, when the aspects of carceral political economics and state-based surveillance revealed themselves in New York, I traced those assemblic relations and their differential distribution to Denpasar and back again to Russia; when the aspect of biopolitical therapeutics revealed itself, I traced it from Russia to New York to Vancouver to Copenhagen. In contrast to a project with one or several fieldwork sites, then, this research unfolded along assemblic relations as they became differentially distributed. Thus, in order to consider anthropologically the contemporary condition, it is not enough to note the various frictions that constitute local intricacies;¹¹ we must ourselves travel along the assemblic relations that constitute the nonlocal complexity that sets the shared conditions for ways of being in diverse locations across the globe.

Assemblic ethnographic writing seeks to mirror this method in that it describes horizontal thickness, as it were, just as much as vertical thickness. In other words, assemblic ethnographic writing gives as much attention to tracing the widely diffused complexity of a situation across its various assemblic relations as it does to localized complexity. This book is an attempt at such assemblic ethnographic writing. For through my analysis of the ways in which the anti–drug war movement fights the drug war through political experimentations for being-together otherwise, I will also analytically describe the widely diffused complexity of the drug war that becomes differentially distributed across the globe and that in large part constitutes the shared conditions of those who get caught up within it.¹² Primarily, I will do this through a number of localized drug war manifestations where this widely diffused complexity has become particularly knotted and the response of the anti–drug war movement has been particularly intense; that is, in New York City, Vancouver, and Copenhagen.

But because assemblic ethnography traces assemblic relations and does not focus on sites, I will also occasionally follow these relations so as to better understand just how truly complex this nontotalizable assemblage has become. Because the anti–drug war movement, in a sense, has already been doing assemblic analysis of that against which it fights, this book will primarily follow those involved in their endeavors to win this now forty-plus-year-old “war on people” so as to disclose some of the contours and limits of the complexity named the drug war and how it affects the being-in-the-world of those who have become caught up in its situated manifestations. In the rest of this chapter, then, I will begin by disclosing, in very broad strokes, some of the assemblic relations that constitute the drug war. In the first section, I try to show the widely diffused complexity of the drug war by briefly tracing some of its various assemblic relations as they become manifest as situations in diverse parts of the globe. After a brief interlude in which I attempt to clarify the concept of situation, I turn to Vancouver in the final section for a closer analysis of one localized and rather intense manifestation of the drug war situation and the political response to it. By briefly illustrating how anti–drug war agonists in Vancouver started doing a situation-based politics of worldbuilding and how this kind of political activity has influenced the global anti–drug war movement, I hope to provide a hermeneutic entrée into the rest of the book so the reader can better understand how the political and ethical experimentations of the anti–drug war movement unfold within the interstices of variously localized drug war situations.

WIDELY DIFFUSED COMPLEXITY AND THE SHARED CONDITIONS OF THE DRUG WAR

In October 2013, while doing research with anti–drug war agonists in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, I attended a public anti–drug war event on the Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad (Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity).¹³ The Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, who was the guest of honor at this Vancouver event, organized the Movimiento as a response to the death of his son by drug war violence, and it now consists of thousands of family members of persons similarly killed or disappeared in the violence of the drug war situation in Mexico. This is a situation in Mexico that has taken its current form in large part by means of American funds, equipment, support, and training to carry out a war in and on the border of Mexico. This is a war in which over one hundred thousand people have been killed since 2006,¹⁴ many of whom, if not the majority, were not drug users, traffickers, cartel members, or police. Rather, most of these drug war dead were simply “average” people who happened to get caught up in this drug war situation.¹⁵

The Movimiento today is most known for the traveling protests it organized called the Caravan for Peace. In 2012 the Caravan traveled throughout Mexico and the United States disclosing the violence of the drug war through stories and performances they enacted in public protest of the unnecessary deaths brought on by the drug war. Through the stories told and performances given by the Caravan, the public image of the drug war as a war against dangerous cartels that seek to harm “our children” is deconstructed, and instead a “war on people” is disclosed as an assemblage partly constituted by militarism, border security, and inequality. The hope of such deconstructive political activity is that it can dislodge hegemonic views and practices and thus provide a clearing from which political possibilities for conceiving, doing, and becoming otherwise emerge.

While this localization of the drug war situation in Mexico, like that of the localization in Colombia, tends to dominate public discourse, such localizations far from exhaust this widely diffused and differentially distributed phenomenon. Consider, for example, the short poem read at the opening of this Vancouver event by Bud Osborn,¹⁶ the Vancouver-area user-agonist-poet and one of the founding members of that city’s user union. I choose to begin with Bud’s poem, which is called “Ironic” and depicts an experience he had while hitchhiking in the United States, because it offers a hermeneutic entrée into the drug war-situated assemblage and discloses the complex, widely diffused nature of this phenomenon. Much like the deconstructive political activity of the Caravan for Peace, so too does Bud’s poem disclose a complexity that goes well beyond a closed issue defined by policy 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 not only in the streets but also in the back rooms of police stations and in 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 of surveillance.²⁸ In 2012, for example, over five hundred thousand individuals were stopped and frisked in New York City alone, 87 percent of whom were either African American or Latino American. Perhaps most disturbing about this form of surveillance is that 89 percent of these stops turned up nothing. Yet the highest number of arrests (over five thousand) were for possessing personal-use quantities of marijuana, which under New York City law is not an offense unless shown in public, which occurs when a police officer asks you to empty your pockets. Overwhelmingly, those stopped, frisked, and arrested are young African American and Latino men, and this tactic is predominantly carried out in the neighborhoods where these men live.²⁹ The result, as illustrated by Terrance, is that this very real possibility of stop-and-frisk that many African Americans and Latino Americans must live with every day in New York and elsewhere has left many feeling that their neighborhoods, their streets, and even their own front stoops are no longer places where they can dwell.³⁰

Stop-and-frisk is likely the most “successful” police tactic in the war on drugs. This is particularly so in New York City, although similar tactics are used in other cities in North America, Great Britain, Russia, and likely elsewhere. As we saw with Bud, this police tactic is also used on a lonesome California highway. It is not only responsible for a significant amount of the surveillance the drug war allows to be placed on neighborhoods and individuals—it also contributes to the vast increase of incarceration rates in the United States and other countries, particularly for those carrying small, personal-use amounts of marijuana. Indeed, the policing and surveillance techniques of the drug war are largely responsible for the mass incarceration of nonviolent and low-level drug users around the globe, as the global prison population has skyrocketed in the last three decades to over ten million persons.³¹ Thus, for example, when Thailand renewed its war on drugs with vigor in 2003, in addition to the over two thousand extrajudicial killings done by the police and military, over seventy thousand people were also rounded up and detained without due process.³² Although the government claims that these were all drug dealers, reports by various nongovernmental organizations and anti–drug war organizations show that most of them were simply drug users. Furthermore, prison population numbers alone do not accurately depict the total number of drug users who are incarcerated, as millions more around the globe are held against their will in the prison-like conditions of various rehabilitation and detention centers. Thus, for example, it is estimated that up to a half million people are held in drug detention centers in China, where they are systematically exposed to “beatings, lack of medical treatment, and rape,” as well as forced labor up to sixteen hours per day, oftentimes in centers that have labor contracts with private companies.³³ Similar conditions can be found in such centers across Russia.³⁴

But no country incarcerates drug users, and its population in general, like the United States, which now has the highest level of incarceration on the planet and, for that matter, the highest level in modern history approached, but not surpassed, only by the Soviet gulag system under Stalin.³⁵ The drug war and its often racialized tactics have fed this mass incarceration such that, for example, in 2012, 1.55 million people were arrested on nonviolent drug charges, the vast majority of whom were African American or Hispanic.³⁶ Indeed, those who profit from this carceral political economics recognize the centrality of current drug policy and laws to their corporate success. Thus, for example, in a 2010 report to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, the country’s “largest owner and operator of privatized correctional and detention facilities” highlighted changes to current drug law as one of the primary risks to its growth and profit.³⁷ This recognition and concern is not surprising since in the last thirty years (or, as we will see shortly, since the militarization and law enforcement aspects of the drug war have become fully knotted) the prison population in the United States has increased by 500 percent, and stop-and-frisk and other forms of drug war surveillance have been key factors in these skyrocketing numbers. Thus, for example, in 1980, a total of 41,000 drug offenders were in all state and federal prisons and local jails, while in 2011 this total stood at 501,500.³⁸

If we follow the assemblic relations of the drug war from these situated manifestations of stop-and-frisk through the hyperaggressive act depicted by Bud of “both cops pull[ing] their guns and aim[ing] them at me,” we are able to disclose how such policing that takes the form of intense violence, intrusive surveillance, and excessive incarceration are in fact intertwined with another aspect of this assemblage. That is, the global militarism aspect. The link between these localized police tactics and global militarism is the militarization of the police. Although police militarization had already slowly started to occur in the 1960s in response to increased civil unrest and urban rioting, it finally emerged as the phenomenon it is today in the 1980s as just one part of what at the time was called a “total war” against drugs. From the 1981 Congressional Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act; to the 1986 National Security Decision Directive 221 that not only instructed the U.S. military to further assist law enforcement agencies but also mandated that it train and help foreign militaries carry out antidrug operations;³⁹ to the 1988 bill authorizing the National Guard to assist local police in drug interdictions; to the 1989 policy that established regional task forces within the Pentagon to work closely with local police in antidrug efforts; to “the 1033 program” of the National Defense Authorization Security Act of 1997, which established the Law Enforcement Support Program to more easily transfer military equipment to local police—all of this resulted in the close cooperation between the military and the police, including the training of the latter by the former, and thus the militarization of police equipment and tactics.⁴⁰ As was recently revealed by the events in Ferguson, Missouri, American local police are now armed with machine guns, tanks, and military-style surveillance equipment and trained in military-style siege, combat, and “interrogation” tactics, enabling them to control and occupy entire neighborhoods and regions in military fashion. Indeed, those weapons manufacturers who sell to both the military and local police recognize the intertwining of global militarism and militarized policing within the drug war assemblage. Thus, for example, the German defense manufacturing company Heckler and Koch advertises the MP5 semiautomatic weapon with: “From the Gulf War to the Drug War—Battle Proven.”⁴¹

This militarization of the police as one aspect of the larger militarization of the drug war has its origins in the 1980s, despite the overwhelming media claim that this is an offshoot of the war on terror. As Radley Balko has convincingly shown, to a great extent the war on terror—like the hostage and rioting scenarios before it—has largely been used as a convenient excuse for the militarization of the police.⁴² For the overwhelming majority of the actual use of militarized police since the 1970s and right up to the writing of this book have been in drug war situations, such that most of the over one hundred SWAT raids that occur daily in the United States are drug related. And, for example, of the fifty thousand to sixty thousand times in 2005 that SWAT teams “violently smash[ed] into private homes,”⁴³ oftentimes in the middle of the night with machine guns blasting, they were not for the purpose of taking down cartels or breaking up a trafficking ring but rather “to enforce laws against consensual crimes,” such as the personal use of some drug.⁴⁴ To the extent, however, that police militarization has increased in response to the war on terror, this is best understood as a tighter intertwining knot of the surveillance and control, carceral political-economic, and global militarism aspects of the drug war assemblage. How this intertwining became knotted can be seen in the development of the latter aspect of the drug war and particularly in the increasing link between counternarcotics and counterterrorism.

The global militarism aspect of the drug war has been significant from the war’s declaration by Nixon in 1971. For not only did this declaration result in the increased funding for domestic law enforcement training and cooperation between enforcement agencies and the creation of new state and federal legislation in support of this law enforcement, but Nixon also used military and economic aid to force countries “to reduce the manufacture and trafficking of narcotics within their borders.”⁴⁵ Beginning from this decisive moment, the drug war assemblage increasingly became—and particularly so during the Reagan and Bush years—partially constituted by an intertwining of national and international legislation, economic aid and development, and military aid and eventually intervention, all of which rested on the international inequalities that characterized Cold War politics.⁴⁶

As the 1980s came to an end, it became increasingly difficult to discern precisely the distinction between drug war and Cold War military operations. This was particularly so throughout Latin America and the Caribbean as the U.S. military became fully entangled with counternarcotics operations. Senator Bob Dole was just one of many at the time to call for a “total war” against drugs and asserted that it was “time to bring the full force [of] military and intelligence communities into this war.”⁴⁷ It was only a matter of time before the George H. W. Bush administration fully committed the U.S. military to the drug war, which was clearly demonstrated in the 1989 invasion of Panama. Although many of the top military brass had resisted the military’s increased role in counternarcotics operations abroad, with the end of the Cold War, many of them came to see the military’s participation in such operations as a means to secure the inflated budgets they had enjoyed over the past decades. Economic analysts who feared the onset of a recession if military expenditures were cut echoed this concern. William Taylor, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, offered one solution to this concern that would prove prescient. Arguing that with the “Soviet threat” eliminated the U.S. military would need to “develop some social-utility arguments” in order to defend its standing reserve of personnel, equipment, and funding, Taylor recommended that the so-called Third World might offer a solution in the form of “insurgency, terrorism, and narcotics interdiction.”⁴⁸

If one of the initial intertwinings of the drug war assemblage was that of counternarcotics operations, global militarism, and the Cold War, then by the late 1990s and the 2000s this would morph into counternarcotics operations, global militarism, and counterterrorism.⁴⁹ Just as the U.S. government claimed that Communist insurgents in Latin America funded their operations with drug trafficking—a claim that at times was tenuous at best—so too it currently makes similar claims about terrorist organizations.⁵⁰ And just as such claims in the 1980s and 1990s allowed for the increased intertwining of economic and military aid, military and law enforcement operations, and military interventions in drug war situations, so too today have these become tightly knotted and manifest in locations such as Afghanistan; Mexico; Central Asia; Southeast Europe; and increasingly, parts of Africa; as well as continuing what had already begun in the 1980s in the United States.⁵¹ At both the national and international levels, then, counternarcotics and counterterrorism often intertwine and emerge in the form of either military intervention as in Afghanistan, Special Ops in Latin America, or militarized police in the United States and elsewhere.

It is primarily this particular emergence of a drug war situation in Mexico that Javier talked about that evening in Vancouver and that the Movimiento focuses its political activity on. This is also the “drug war” that gets most of the media and other public discursive attention. Bud’s poem, however, disrupts this narrow public discursive focus and discloses the nonlocalized complexity that is the drug war. Beginning with his poem as a hermeneutic entrée, I have tried to trace the assemblic relations of the drug war to show that it goes well beyond these localized and situated emergences, which, it should be noted, typical anthropological ethnography tends to focus upon, and that any comprehensive analysis of the drug war must recognize this widely diffused and complex assemblic phenomenon. In other words, in this section I have tried to show that the drug war can only be understood as a complex assemblage of, among other things, state-based surveillance and control, biopolitical therapeutics, carceral-political economics, militarized police violence, and global militarism in its various forms over the past forty years, and, as a consequence, all of these can only be understood in terms of their relation to the drug war.

INTERLUDE—A SITUATION THEORETICALLY DESCRIBED

So far I have been trying to show that the way in which the global anti–drug war movement conceives of, experiences, and addresses the drug war is best analyzed as what I am calling a situation. By situation I mean a nontotalizable assemblage widely diffused across different global scales that allows us to conceptualize how persons and objects that are geographically, socioeconomically, and “culturally” distributed get caught up in shared conditions that significantly affect their possible ways of being-in-the-world. This might become clearer if we consider what we normally mean when we say something like, “We found ourselves in this situation” or ask, “What can I do in this situation I’m in?” These are ways we articulate the recognition that “to be in a situation” is at one and the same time something that falls upon us, or perhaps better put, we get caught up in, and to a great extent, but not entirely, provides the conditions for possible ways of being, doing, speaking, and thinking within that situation. Thus, this is recognition that a situation is both a singularity of which one has become a part and a multiplicity that both preexists one’s participation in it and as already having been, exceeds this localized instance of it. The multiplicity of a situation, however, denotes more than its durative and widely diffused existence. It also indicates its multiaspectual nature; for a situation is not a closed and totalized occurrence that appears as if from nowhere. Rather, and as I have been trying to show, a situation is constituted by diverse phenomena that become intertwined and emerge temporarily as localized manifestations. It is in these ways, then, that a situation can be described as a singular multiplicity that provides widely diffused but shared conditions.

Recently, some nonanthropological scholars have also recognized the significance of widely diffused phenomena with localized affect and have reconceived analytic and political concepts accordingly.⁵² Timothy Morton, for example, has done this to address global warming, which he conceives as a hyperobject.⁵³ Morton defines hyperobjects as “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.” As a result, hyperobjects are nonlocal because any local manifestation of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject itself, or at least not the totality of the object. A hurricane or a tsunami, for example, may be a local manifestation of the hyperobject of global warming, but it is not global warming as such. Similarly, although the drug war locally emerges differentially in various forms, such as the surveillance-induced oppression experienced, for example, by Terrance in New York City, Bud in California, or Joey in Denpasar, these are not the drug war as such.

Despite this and other similarities, however, there are real differences between hyperobjects and situations as I am trying to articulate them. The most significant difference is that Morton conceives a hyperobject as a real object, or a unit unto itself that withdraws from other objects as well as itself and thus can never fully be known or touched by another object. This is how the object-oriented ontology to which Morton subscribes defines objects,⁵⁴ and within this perspective everything, including humans, are objects with just these qualities. But this raises the question: if objects cannot touch or influence each other,⁵⁵ except for perhaps in aesthetic ways, then what are we left to do politically when confronted with a hyperobject such as global warming? Although the notion of a hyperobject as “massively distributed in time and space” is compelling and in some ways similar to a situation, it is difficult to imagine the kind of politics to be done by those who cannot “touch” and against that which itself cannot be “touched.” In contrast, because situations can be described as ecstatically relational, assembling, and thus emergent multiplicities, they can and do slip into one another. This makes situations ripe with sites of potentiality and thus open for political activity.

A similar concern arises with Alain Badiou’s notion of situation. In the most recent explication of his ontology, Badiou replaces the concept of situation with world, but for our purposes we can still think of this as his rendering of situation.⁵⁶ For Badiou, a situation/world comes into existence, maintains that existence, and is recognizable as such because it has a particular and unique logic that orders it. If for Badiou “being qua being is thought by mathematics,” then a situation/world as “appearing, or being-there-in-a-world, is thought by logic.”⁵⁷ Indeed, as he goes on to put it, situations/worlds are not simply thought by logic, they are logic.⁵⁸ And this logic is not a procedure that a human subject utilizes to understand a situation/world, so argues Badiou, but rather this logic that fundamentally is situations/worlds “is altogether anterior to every subjective constitution.”⁵⁹ A situation/world for Badiou, then, is the local emplacement of a logical operation that occurs regardless of human existence.⁶⁰ This is clearly not what I intend by a situation, and in fact, it is precisely the kind of metaphysical humanist thinking and politics that I am trying to argue against.⁶¹

If the concern of these and other contemporary ontologists is the explication of a posthumanist politics, then it seems odd to do so in logicomathematical terms or by simply reversing the subject/object distinction and thus perpetuating a metaphysical humanist approach. In contrast, the critical hermeneutic approach begins with Heidegger’s notion of phenomenon (“what shows itself in itself”) and through analysis discloses that humans are always already intertwined in various situations, and this intertwining both precedes and exceeds any possible humanist projection onto it. To be in any world at all, and the situations that structure them, is always already to be so intertwined and as such always becoming that which situations make possible.⁶² But this alone does not make a situation a more compelling analytic and political concept. In the rest of this section, then, I consider further the phenomenon of situation as it “shows itself in itself.” In so doing I delineate the fundamental characteristics of a situation, which in turn will set the background for the following section, in which I consider some of the political activity of the anti–drug war movement as a way of setting the scene for the rest of the book. So as to make this analytically clear, I will delineate the various characteristics of situations in numbered subsections.

1. A Situation Is a Nontotalizable Assemblage

As we have already seen, the drug war is a complex assemblage of diverse aspects of other assemblages, such as global militarism; state-based surveillance and control; border security; carceral political economics; national and international inequalities; and as I will show in the next section, biopolitical therapeutics. What is called the drug war, then, is no “thing” in itself but rather is assembled aspects of other assemblages that together create a widely diffused situation that is differentially distributed with very real effects in worlds. Here we can begin to see how the concept of assemblages can be helpful for thinking the complexity of situations about which I wrote in the opening paragraphs of this section and how this differs from Morton’s hyperobjects and Badiou’s situations/worlds.

Anthropologists are likely most familiar with the notion of assemblage through Ong and Collier’s rendering of it in terms of global assemblages.⁶³ There is little doubt that their edited volume has made an important and influential contribution to the development of the discipline since its publication. And to the extent that Ong and Collier’s global assemblage articulates the basics of a general theory of assemblages most fully developed, for example, by Deleuze and Guattari, Latour, and DeLanda, there are similarities with what I am calling a situation, which is a nontotalized assemblage. I differ significantly from Ong and Collier, however, in that despite claims to the contrary, they seem to conceive global assemblages as supplements to what they variously refer to as “social and cultural situations,” “spheres of life,” “environments,” and “context.”⁶⁴ In contrast, over the course of the last decade I have been thinking through the concept of nontotalizable assemblages—whether in terms of moral and ethical assemblages⁶⁵ or worlds and situations⁶⁶—in such a way that entails that they not be thought of in terms of a supplement. In some ways my thinking of assemblages has paralleled that of Paul Rabinow.⁶⁷ But while Rabinow seems to conceive of assemblages as primarily localized and temporary (thus, not unlike how I conceive of situations), I have come to think of our worlds as nothing other than densely intertwined knots of several much more widely diffused and nontotalizable assemblages that constantly flow together and slip apart in a potentially infinite number of combinations. This flowing and slippage of the singular multiplicity of situations defies totalized categorization or identification. This is precisely why as nontotalizable assemblages situations cannot be thought as supplement, for there is nothing other than traces of other such assemblages to “supplement.”

Thus, for example, the diverse aspects of the drug war situation can easily slip into other nontotalized assemblages and thereby defy easy identification with either. As we saw in the previous section, the global militarism aspect of the drug war situation can be foregrounded and reconceived as the war on terrorism or a defense against Communist insurgents, and police militarization and carceral political economics can be repositioned as being tough on crime. As a result a situation is quite slippery since it never all at once can be fully grasped because part of its very nature is the capacity for its constitutive aspects to be temporarily refigured. Such refiguration can occur “naturally,” as it were, since aspects of situations take on different signification as they are represented, experienced, or considered differently. Or, this refiguration can be done intentionally and strategically, as certain persons may wish to emphasize one particular “interpretation” of an aspect over others—for example, mandatory minimum prison sentencing as being tough on crime rather than judicial procedures with clear racial and class prejudices. Indeed, this slippery intertwining is one of the primary characteristics of the robust complexity of the drug war that makes resisting it so difficult and that an assemblic ethnography seeks to disentangle. Because of this complexity, I am trying to argue that we must begin our anthropological analyses not at so-called global assemblages that supplement a preexisting context but instead with the situations that make evident that we are always already caught up in singular multiples that provide the widely diffused but yet shared conditions that significantly affect our possible ways of being-in-the-world.

2. A Situation Is Not Singularly Locatable

Because a situation is never isolable and only exists as a singular multiple—that is, as always intertwined with other assemblages, a situation is never located. Rather, as I have been emphasizing so far, a situation becomes temporarily localized. Thus, for example, the situation of the drug war is not simply located in the veins of heroin users crouched under American highway overpasses or in the jungles of South America or the borders between the United States and Mexico or the poppy fields of Afghanistan; nor is the drug war simply located in the substance called heroin that is actually a range of potentially infinite kinds of beings as opium derivatives get cut with more contaminants every step they move through the underground commodity chain; nor is the drug war simply located in American, Russian, or Thai prisons or in the infectious disease wards of hospitals around the globe. Rather, the drug war emerges—at times but not always—in all of these locales and more. Notice, however, that these locales are not always and only caught up in the drug war. For example, there are people in prisons, infectious disease wards, and under bridges who are there for reasons unrelated to the drug war. Thus, only by attending and being attuned to each of these situated manifestations of the drug war, and their unique, similar, and shared potentialities and emergent actualities, can this situation be effectively politically addressed or anthropologically analyzed. It is precisely this attunement that characterizes an assemblic ethnography.

3. Sites of Potentiality for Political Activity Arise from the Interstices of Situations

The conglomeritic and flowing nature of assembled situations leaves them with interstices of noncohesion. As we saw in the previous section, these interstitial sites disrupt any possibility for an actually existing totality of a situation and therefore, any possibility for thinking or articulating the totality of a situation. At these interstices, problematics of a situation likely occur, and sites of potentiality can be found, from which possibilities for political activity emerge.⁶⁸ This differs significantly from the “untouchable” hyperobjects of Morton or even the bounded issues or identities that dominate most contemporary politics. To some extent this rendering of situations as sites of potentiality is similar to Max Gluckman’s⁶⁹ classic articulation of situations as moments of paradox, confrontation, conflict, process, and potential change.⁷⁰ Despite this similarity, however, I entirely reject the Gluckmanian claim that they disclose social structure conceived as a transcendental. Indeed, the argument I am trying to make is that situations allow us to begin to conceive shared conditions that are widely dispersed across various levels, horizontally and vertically, as it were, without the necessity of any transcendental at all, whether this be thought of in terms of social structure, culture, Badiou’s logic, or Ong and Collier’s “context.” In the next section and throughout this book, I will show how the anti–drug war movement is now addressing such sites of potentiality in their experimental political activity without the need of such “bannisters.”

The Situationists similarly conceived of situations as nontranscendentally structured sites of politics, at which experiment and play could be done in the attempt to bring about an otherwise.⁷¹ But if Situationists saw the first political task as the construction of situations from which political experiment and play could begin,⁷² then the anti–drug war movement begins by disclosing already existing situations that must be permanently transformed so as to build new worlds in which drug users and nonusers alike can dwell. The conceptual, analytical, and methodological problem the complexity of situations presents, then, is how precisely to trace and articulate the movement, force, and limits of the intertwining so as to initiate this transformation. Similarly, I submit that these problems are central to anthropology and the other human and social sciences today, as they struggle to address the increasingly complex contemporary global configuration of things. Thus, I have been attempting to delineate the concept of situation and the method of assemblic ethnography as possible ways of addressing this complexity.

In the next section, I turn to a brief example of how some actors in the anti–drug war movement show us how a politics that begins from a situation can be done. What I want to emphasize is how this political activity does not begin from a “problem” singularly conceptualized, and thus it does not focus its energy on simply trying to “change policy” or laws—although there is, of course, some effort aimed at this—or to become included into that which already is. Rather, because of their recognition of the complexity of the drug war, anti–drug war agonists focus upon interstitial potentiality, from which they can begin to clear and open new possibilities for other ways of being and, eventually, for other worlds to emerge. In the final section of this chapter, then, I consider how this has started to occur from the interstitial site between the surveillance and control aspect and that of biopolitical therapeutics.

A POLITICS THAT BEGINS FROM A SITUATION

Bud read his poem at a public anti–drug war event held at a university annex that is part of a recently constructed public-private housing complex on the border of the Downtown Eastside neighborhood in Vancouver, where a politics of worldbuilding has been going on for twenty years. By 1997 an estimated six thousand to ten thousand drug users, over half of whom were HIV positive, were concentrated in just a few square blocks; over six thousand persons lived in single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels; a constant police presence resulted in regular and random harassment and arrests; and the death toll mounted. The potential for a situation-focused politics was all around and in fact was already emerging in 1993 when what would eventually become one of the key housing and drug user organizations in the neighborhood was formed and made harm reduction—and particularly the provisioning of clean syringes and works—an inseparable part of its political activity related to housing. As one of the cofounders of the organization put it, at the time this was quite radical and experimental, and now it is fairly common practice. The key political point here is that these anti–drug war agonists recognized that in the Downtown Eastside the housing problem, drug use, police harassment, and HIV and other infectious diseases were inextricably intertwined, and thus addressing only one in isolation would be more or less as if they were not addressing anything at all. This was the recognition of the necessity of a politics that addresses situations and not isolated issues, and it would be this recognition that would become characteristic of the global anti–drug war movement.

Indeed, well beyond Vancouver the anti–drug war movement is a global political movement that mirrors the characteristics of the situation it addresses. Just as the drug war is an assemblage of diverse aspects of other assemblages, so too is the anti–drug war movement an assemblage of diverse collaborators⁷³ that mobilize to address, for example, local, national, and international antidrug legislation and policy; fatally dangerous therapeutics; carceral-political economics; and punitive policing, among other items. The kind of politics done by those in the anti–drug war movement, then, recognizes the multiple ways in which the drug war touches and affects their and most others’ ways of being and mobilizes accordingly. This is the kind of political movement that William Connolly argues is needed today to address what he calls the “contemporary condition,” a movement he describes as “anchored entirely in no single class, gender, ethnic group, creed or generation” and taking “the shape of a vibrant pluralist assemblage acting at multiple sites within and across states.”⁷⁴ This is precisely what the anti–drug war movement is, and it takes this form because it is addressing one of the most widely diffused situations that significantly shapes the “contemporary condition” no matter where one might be.