17.04.2024

Course: "America’s War on Drugs" at the d.a.i.

“America's War against Drugs” [and China's role in it], Wed 18:00-19:30, d.a.i., Karlstr. 3, room “New York”, Scott Stelle (scott@empire-institute.com)

The course can be used for "Schlüsselqualifikationen". English on the level B2 is required.

Plants have been continuously cultivated for their medical and intoxicating effects since the birth of civilization. The use of intoxicants is a multifaceted phenomenon that has touched every culture in the world. One of the earliest global impacts of the illegal drug trade was the First Opium War in China (1839–1842). Illicit drug use first entered the DNA of American society through jazz music, the avant-garde and the underground. This deviant subculture spread until it reached America’s most educated and affluent generation, who became swept up in the most dramatic statistical explosion of drug use. Boomers then transmitted and popularized the drug experience through various channels (music, literature, film, art, fashion and advertising) that influenced the global youth culture. However, at the same time, the U.S. government has imposed a drug war on its citizens and the world.

The U.S.  government has been committed to combating the drug trade since President Wilson signed the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. U.S. delegates had earlier contributed to the International Opium Commission in Shanghai, 1909. America’s modern war on drugs was launched before the government had banned intoxicating liquors. And, just as Prohibition was ending, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) was founded and sent its first commissioner Harry Anslinger to sign the Geneva Limitation Convention in 1931, which became the U.N.’s Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in 1946. In China, the drug policy of the ruling Kuomintang Party and the Japanese occupants was quite ambivalent and oscillated between suppression and fiscal abuse.

Yet, by the end of the century, America had played a key role in establishing the U.N. drug control regime, whose legal norms are backed by a global system of militarized police enforcement. Yet, while there is a growing awareness that America's brutal “war on drugs” has been a massive failure, the UN drug regime’s colonial and racist roots are also being internationally criticized. 

This interdisciplinary course will focus on U.S. drug policy from the perspective of international economic history, with particular reference to America’s bulging prison population of poor people of color who are disproportionately incarcerated. Drug possession doesn’t only lead to prison, it also leads to loss of civil and voting rights. We shall examine how America’s drug war creates racialized surveillance as well as racial discrimination and segregation, i.e., the so-called “New Jim Crow” caste-like legal system. Topics like organized crime, psychopharmacology, addiction, as well as medicalization vs criminalization drug policies will also be discussed.