Description
The normalization of widespread civilian deaths and militarization of policy responses appear as the enduring conditions of the global fight against narcotic drugs. Based on the Global Burden of Diseases data, illegal drug use is attributed as the immediate cause for nearly 585,000 premature deaths annually, as such drugs facilitated increased risk of suicide, hepatitis, cancer, HIV, and hepatis. Invoking the perceived danger of illegal drug use to public health, state and transnational policy responses resorted to punitive measures such as intensified incarceration, police and military mobilization, as well as demonization of anyone involved in narcotic drugs. Consequently, widespread incarceration and the emergence of militarism in domestic law enforcement, particularly targeting anti-narcotic drug use, became widespread globally.
The core argument states that militarism and the consolidation of carceral states have emerged as the world's dominant modalities for combatting narcotic drug proliferation. The dominant political logics of militarization and incarceration have gained traction in ways that constitute a global normative order of anti-narcotic drug regulation underwritten by intensified militarism and pervasive organized violence but justified through appealing ideas of the promotion of peace, security, human rights, and development. Empirically, in the cases of the Global South and North, national governments have primarily deployed the morally appealing concepts of peace, human rights, security, democracy and other similar notions as justificatory discourses for increased state repression, intensified the criminalization of the drug problem, and exhibited their reluctance in embracing a public health approach to the proliferation of narcotic drugs.
