Jarrett Zigon - A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community

A War on People

A War on People

Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community

Jarrett Zigon

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

2019 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Zigon, Jarrett, author.

Title: A war on people : drug user politics and a new ethics of community / Jarrett Zigon.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018017687 (print) | LCCN 2018021810 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520969957 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520297692 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520297708 (pbk : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH : Drug controlCitizen participation. | Drug abusersPolitical activity.

Classification: LCC HV 5801 (ebook) | LCC HV 5801 . Z 54 2019 (print) | DDC 363.325/15613dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017687

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For all of those who fight against wars on people.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.

It has to face the men of the time and to meet

The women of the time. It has to think about war

And it has to find what will suffice. It has

To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage....

Wallace Stevens, Of Modern Poetry

Contents

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the help and support of what I call the antidrug war movement, so before anything else I need to begin by thanking everyone who is a part of it, not only for their help with this research, but, much more importantly, for their tireless fight to end this war on people. I would like to single out a few individuals and organizations, however, who were particularly helpful in the research that led to this book: Matt Curtis, Daniel Wolfe, Mark Townsend, Russell Maynard, Sarah Evans, Fred Wright, Jeremy Saunders, Terrell Jones, Robert Suarez, Elizabeth Owens, and everyone at VOCAL-NY, the Portland Hotel Society, and the Danish Drug Users Unionfor active drug users.

The research and writing of this book were made possible from funding provided by a Vidi grant from the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) and the European Research Council under the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme, ERC grant agreement n 281148. I would like to thank everyone at the University of Amsterdam who helped administer these grants and provided much-needed and helpful support along the way. Special thanks for this go out to Jos Komen and Janus Oomen.

Parts of this book have appeared either partially or as earlier drafts in the journal Cultural Anthropology ().

Many people over the years have in one way or another stimulated my thinking and thus took part in the emergence of this book. I thank the following persons for important conversations around the topics and ideas explored in this book or for reading versions of it, whether in part or in whole, all of whom have been essential to its outcome: Talal Asad, Jason Throop, Patrick Neveling, Martin Holbraad, Robert Desjarlais, China Scherz, Charles Stewart, Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Rasmus Dyring, Alessandro Duranti, Megan Raschig, Lex Kuiper, Oliver Human, Stine Grinna, Annemarie Samuel, Michael Jackson, Niko Besnier, Jonathan Lear, Cheryl Mattingly, Elizabeth Povinelli, Oskar Verkaaik, Henrik Vigh, Joshua Burraway, Kabir Tambar, Ghassan Hage, Samuele Collu, Miriam Ticktin, Joe Hankins, James Laidlaw, Brian Goldstone, Elinor Ochs, and Joel Robbins. I also thank Natalie Frigo, Eric Werner, Steve Chaney, and Mark Francis for their ever-important friendship. For their ceaseless support, I thank my parents: Sandy, David, Janelle, and Chris. The final version of this book took shape thanks to the editorial guidance of Reed Malcolm and the helpful comments of the reviewers. I also thank all those whom I may have forgotten.

Lastly, as always, Sylvia Tidey is the key to everything. Without her with me, nothing would be possible.

Introduction

On War and Potentiality

War is the health of the State.

Randolph Silliman Bourne

The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization.

Giorgio Agamben

Recently, political anthropologists and theorists have begun to address two interrelated problematic concerns. The first is the seemingly widespread lack of motivation for participating in political activity. Addressing these two problematics of politics seems increasingly urgent in a time characterized by anxiety and precarity. Across the globe a predominantlyand thus by no means exclusivelyright-wing-led populist response to this has been a nostalgic return to a past greatness that never actually was. Thus, for example, the 1950s seems to be the best imagined future for many in both the United States and Russia today, while in the United Kingdom and much of Europe there is a strong desire to return to an ethnonationalist purity that supposedly existed sometime before the European Union arrived on the scene. If history did end with the Cold War, then it increasingly seems that many do not consider it to have been a happy ending and are eager to restart it, this time as farce.

Confronted with this contemporary condition in which many clearly seek an otherwise but without a vision of what that might be, political anthropologists and theorists have come to recognize the dual problem of this lack of political motivation and alternative visions. Notwithstanding the now increasingly common recognition of these lacks and a few important attempts to offer theoretical alternatives to traditional political thinking, the actual articulation of what a possible future might be and how it may be achieved remains largely missing from this growing body of literature.

This book is an attempt to address this lacunae by offering a glimpse at one of these possible futures and showing the political process by which its potential is being ushered into existence by some unlikely political actors: active and former users of heavy drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine. I call these political actors unlikely because for over a century drug users around the globe have been systematically excluded not only from political processes but, as will become clear throughout this book, from humanity as well. What I hope to show and consider in this book, however, is that despite this unlikelihood, the globally networked antidrug war political movement organized and run by drug users is, in fact, at the forefront of offering an alternative political and social imaginary. In particular, I will focus my considerations on how this antidrug war imaginary and political activity is enacting nonnormative, open, and relationally inclusive alternatives to such key ethical-political concepts as community, freedom, and care.

For many it may seem odd that so-called addicts and junkies could show us an alternative social and political vision. But as I hope becomes clear throughout this book and as I will emphasize in condition within which many of us now find ourselves. This condition, I will argue shortly, is best considered one of war as governance. If the drug war is just one particularly clear example of this global condition of war as governance, then the wager of this book is that the ways in which the antidrug war movement fights against the drug warand the alternative worlds they are creating in doing somay offer us some guidance in rethinking some of our most basic political and ethical motivations, tactics, and aims.