![]() Offering concepts such as “narco-colonialism” (Villar and Cottle 2011), “drug war capitalism” (Paley 2014), and “gore capitalism” (Valencia 2016), t his research understands drug war rhetoric, legislation, and militarization as a mechanism of necropolitical expansion into the Global South. To address the persistence of WoD methods and rhetoric, recent research focuses on a comprehensive analysis of the outcomes of anti-drug policy. ![]() citizens to swing into action as “when we were attacked in World War II.” Since then, the prohibitionist approach to narcotics has unsuccessfully attempted to reduce rates of consumption by seizing supply sources and dismantling distribution routes, within and outside the nation’s borders. Throughout his presidency, Nixon launched an all-out offensive to fight drug abuse, or what he described as the U nited States ’ “public enemy number one.” At the dusk of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan expanded the reach and power of this offensive by framing the fight against addiction as a new “war for our freedom” and ordered U.S. President Richard Nixon set the legal and militaristic foundations for the modern global WoD. ![]() The War on Drugs as Necropolitical Expansionīuilding on early 20th century drug-related xenophobic fears and racist stereotypes, U.S. As a conclusion, it proposes that the trafficking routes are not only maps of capitalist expansion but also potential networks of solidarity between Global South communities that endure similar conditions of exploitation. This essay presents the drug war as a global mechanism to police, disenfranchise, and displace poor communities of color in areas of capitalist expansion. In this transnational perspective, a description of the cocaine and heroin trades will exemplify how the war successfully legitimizes the militarization and appropriation of territories for political intervention and economic exploitation.Īfter presenting recent academic research that proposes an analysis of the expansionist objectives of the WoD, this essay briefly presents the cocaine and heroin trades as instances of how the WoD: a) facilitates the militarization and paramilitarization of producing nations where social movements, insurgencies, and armed resistances prevent corporations from freely accessing areas for extraction of resources a nd b) legitimizes the world-wide criminalization, policing, and mass incarceration of racialized communities. Shifting the focus on the WoD from its unobtained goals to the actual outcomes of law enforcement, my intent here is to clarify how the WoD has been and continues to be a militaristic and economic success for the United States. ![]() However, despite the lack of results and the human cost of still-increasing incarceration and violence, governments and intergovernmental organizations around the world continue to invest in a global war on the production and distribution of illegal narcotics. It is thus common for institutional reports, journalistic articles, and academic studies to declare the complete “failure” of the WoD. The U.S.-led global War on Drugs (WoD) refers to the conflict and violence produced by the enforcement of prohibitionist policies on the manufacture, distribution, and consumption of banned substances commonly known as “illegal drugs.” After forty years of a militaristic approach to a public health problem, studies continue to report higher records of narcotics production in so-called southern nations, and rising rates of consumption particularly in northern economies.
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