aeon | When the US President Richard Nixon announced his ‘war on drugs’ in
1971, there was no need to define the enemy. He meant, as everybody
knew, the type of stuff you couldn’t buy in a drugstore. Drugs
were trafficked exclusively on ‘the street’, within a subculture that
was immediately identifiable (and never going to vote for Nixon anyway).
His declaration of war was for the benefit of the majority of voters
who saw these drugs, and the people who used them, as a threat to their
way of life. If any further clarification was needed, the drugs Nixon
had in his sights were the kind that were illegal.
Today, such certainties seem quaint and distant. This May, the UN
office on drugs and crime announced that at least 348 ‘legal highs’ are
being traded on the global market, a number that dwarfs the total of
illegal drugs. This loosely defined cohort of substances is no longer
being passed surreptitiously among an underground network of ‘drug
users’ but sold to anybody on the internet, at street markets and petrol
stations. It is hardly a surprise these days when someone from any
stratum of society – police chiefs, corporate executives, royalty –
turns out to be a drug user. The war on drugs has conspicuously failed
on its own terms: it has not reduced the prevalence of drugs in society,
or the harms they cause, or the criminal economy they feed. But it has
also, at a deeper level, become incoherent. What is a drug these days?
Consider, for example, the category of stimulants, into which the
majority of ‘legal highs’ are bundled. In Nixon’s day there was, on the
popular radar at least, only ‘speed’: amphetamine, manufactured by biker
gangs for hippies and junkies. This unambiguously criminal trade still
thrives, mostly in the more potent form of methamphetamine: the world
knows its face from the US TV series Breaking Bad, though it is
at least as prevalent these days in Prague, Bangkok or Cape Town. But
there are now many stimulants whose provenance is far more ambiguous.
Pharmaceuticals such as modafinil and Adderall have become the
stay-awake drugs of choice for students, shiftworkers and the
jet-lagged: they can be bought without prescription via the internet,
host to a vast and vigorously expanding grey zone between medical and
illicit supply. Traditional stimulant plants such as khat or coca leaf
remain legal and socially normalised in their places of origin, though
they are banned as ‘drugs’ elsewhere. La hoja de coca no es droga!
(the coca leaf is not a drug) has become the slogan behind which Andean
coca-growers rally, as the UN attempts to eradicate their crops in an
effort to block the global supply of cocaine. Meanwhile, caffeine has
become the indispensable stimulant of modern life, freely available in
concentrated forms such as double espressos and energy shots, and indeed
sold legally at 100 per cent purity on the internet, with deadly
consequences. ‘Legal’ and ‘illegal’ are no longer adequate terms for
making sense of this hyperactive global market.
The unfortunate term ‘legal highs’ reflects this confusion. It has
become a cliché to note its imprecision: most of the substances it
designates are not strictly legal to sell, while at the same time it
never seems to include the obvious candidates – alcohol, caffeine and
nicotine. The phrase hasn’t quite outgrown its apologetic inverted
commas, yet viable alternatives are thin on the ground: ‘novel
psychoactive substance’ (NPS), the clunky circumlocution that is
preferred in drug-policy circles, is unlikely to enter common parlance.
‘Legal highs’, for all its inaccuracies, points to a zone beyond the
linguistic reach of the war on drugs, that fervid state of mind in which
any separation between ‘drugs’ and ‘illegal’ seems like a contradiction
in terms. Then again, if that conceptual link breaks down, what does become of the old idea of drugs? When the whiff of criminality finally disperses, what are we left with?
