Description
Why does a global narcotics governance regime that has failed to achieve its central objective—a ‘drug-free world’—endure, despite ever-louder calls for reform? It is assailed on all sides, yet prohibitionism remains essentially unassailable as the regime’s core organizing principle despite its advanced decay. In the West, liberalizing pressure manifests itself in ‘soft defection’ at the margins: i.e. greater harm reduction policy, reduced criminalization, increased healthcare interventions, and even recreational legalization. In the East, defection occurs in the opposite direction: i.e. harm augmentation, encompassed in increasingly punitive and hardline responses that frequently result in severe human rights abuses. In both cases, there is a degree of normative and substantive divergence from prohibitionism, yet the overarching edifice remains broadly intact.
This paper argues that an under-acknowledged part of the explanation for the puzzling co-existence of norm decay alongside regime ossification lies in waning US hegemony. In the 1960s, Washington was both able and willing to exert genuinely hegemonic influence over the establishment and institutionalization of the regime. However, it no longer has the capacity to recast it in a new image attendant with its own (contradictory) processes of liberalization. Moreover, because the ideology of prohibitionism was embedded so deeply in the institutions and practices that accompanied the expansion of the regime, its normative power as an accepted ‘common sense’ has remained remarkably resilient despite its evident shortcomings, rendering substantive reform exceptionally difficult in a post-hegemonic world. The paper fills a gap in the literature whereby contemporary IR and IPE scholars have rarely applied the analytical tools conventionally used to understand the post-1945 liberal order in general to the global governance of drugs in particular.
