Drugs, Law, People, Place and the State
Ongoing regulation, resistance and change
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Book Description
Though any psychoactive substance can be revered or reviled as a drug, as people’s cultural norms shift, ultimately its status is determined in law by the state. This publication explores the regulation of drugs – alcohol and cannabis to heroin and cocaine – and practices such as social drinking and public injecting under political regimes. Drugs are discussed in their geographical contexts: the colonial legacy of cannabis prohibition for bioprospecting in Africa; the veracity of the persistent notion of the narco-state; Turkey’s governance of drinking amid civil unrest; and alcohol’s place in the neoliberal political economy of Ireland. In addition, drug policies are examined: from problems in managing drug-related litter in the UK to supervised injecting facility provision in Australia; harm reduction in Canada; and the global network of drug policy activists. Place is significant, but porous borders, territorial overlaps and multi-scalar linkages are influential in remaking the world through current challenges to the ‘war on drugs’. This book was originally published as a special issue of Space & Polity.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
Stewart Williams & Barney Warf - The agricultural politics of Cannabis control in colonial and post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa
Chris Duval - The myth of the narco-state
Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy - From raki to ayran: regulating the place and practice of drinking in Turkey
Emine Ö. Evered & Kyle T. Evered - Neoliberalism and the alcohol industry in Ireland
Julien Mercille - Colliding intervention in the spatial management of street-based injecting and drug related litter in public settings
Stephen Parkin - Space, scale and jurisdiction in health service provision for drug users: the legal geography of a supervised injecting facility
Stewart Williams - Political struggles on a frontier of harm reduction drug policy: geographies of constrained policy mobility
Andy Longhurst & Eugene McCann - Mobilizing drug policy activism: conference spaces, convergence spaces, and assemblage
Cristina Temenos - Conclusion
Barney Warf & Stewart Williams
Editor(s)
Biography
Stewart Williams is interested in matters of risk, regulation and resilience from the perspective of public policy and spatial planning. He has combined critical social theory with mixed research methods to analyse housing and homelessness, climate change and disaster management, community decline and regeneration, and drug production and consumption.
Barney Warf’s research concerns producer services and telecommunications, particularly the geographies of the internet, including the digital divide, e-government, and internet censorship. He examines these topics, and such others as political geography, religion, cosmopolitanism, and corruption, through the lens of political economy and social theory.