Description
Why does a decaying global narcotics prohibition regime that has palpably failed to achieve its central objective of ‘a drug-free world’ while generating enormous social dislocation continue to endure, despite ever-louder calls for its reform or even complete abandonment? There exists widespread dissatisfaction as the myriad failures of the War on Drugs and its desperate consequences become increasingly evident. The treaties underpinning prohibition never truly enjoyed an international consensus, yet the current moment is marked especially by dissensus: some countries – including, ironically, the US itself – are soft-defecting from some parts of the regime by pursuing experiments in legalisation, especially of cannabis and psychedelics, whereas others favour ever-more hard-line, punitive responses. However, despite being assailed on all sides, the regime itself appears essentially unassailable, with radical critique often accompanied by distinctly unambitious reform proposals. This paper argues that waning US hegemony is a crucial and largely unacknowledged explanation for this stasis in a regime that has rarely been examined by IR or IPE scholars: on the one hand, because prohibition was a peculiar expression of American moral suasion and political coercion that rose alongside its wider post-1945 hegemonic project, it necessarily follows that its present travails reflect the contradictions and complexities of the partial unravelling of that order; on the other, though, because the discursive norms and surveillance programmes that characterised prohibition were so tightly formulated and lavishly financed, they produced enduring geopolitical structures and vested interests that have remained remarkably impervious to reform. This makes the job of recasting the regime—which the modern US has neither the will nor capacity to decisively pursue—even more difficult than it might otherwise be.
