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Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics

by Curtis Marez
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004
384 pp., illus. 20 b/w. Trade, $59.95; paper, $19.95
ISBN: 0-816-64059-9; ISBN: 0-816-64060-2.

Reviewed by Martha Patricia Niño Mojica
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana de Bogotá, Colombia

ninom@javeriana.edu.co

Curtis Marez is Assistant Professor of Critical Studies at The University of Southern California School of Cinema—Television. Marez’s investigation is passionate and has considered 200 years of cultural productions around drug trafficking, including drug war literature, music, and movies. Those elements provide cognitive maps for weaving connections about local and global power relations. While focusing most on the part in militarism, drug wars have failed to address important social aspects of the problem, such as prevention, education, and treatment. One evident example is Colombia, a country that, in spite of the military aid received, has not improved very much in its negative humanitarian record. The investigation includes the mass media representations of the British Opium war in Asia during the 19th century; descriptions of opium dens, and an interesting chapter about exotic bodies, sexuality, and opium entitled Strange Bedfellows, Opium and the political Economy of Sexuality; the marijuana traffic during the Mexican borderlands in the 1930’s; and the relation between the history of psychoanalysis and cocaine.

Marez equates media wars with drug wars, which may explain the unavoidable amounts of misleading information about the topic. The writing also points out the irregular and hierarchical globalization that is taking place. The prosecuting of drug dealers tend to spotlight the poor, partisans that sow the illegal plantations because they see no alternatives for a living, instead of targeting corporations that profit from laundering money and leave huge amount of profit. That indicates the disposability of poor people into the global economy.

Along the way, he also addresses the topic of identity and wide spread media representations of what it means to be Mexican, indigenous or Latin, what Marez calls "subaltern" people. The US war on drugs makes visible struggles over the representation of this group that is described in ways that infantilize, feminize, or sexualize them. On the other hand, they have own media representations that create alternative discourses, usually through popular music, as it is the case with the Mexican Narcorridos genre.

The text criticizes cultural productions related to the internal contradictions or hypocrisies of drug policies inherent to the drug wars, and how they have been shaping global discourses about race, insurgence, and modernity. His approach is Neo Marxist. It can be seen as somewhat paranoid, daring or provocative, but he recognizes that it is not the only one possible perspective; it is an attention-grabbing and well-documented reading on the theme.

 

 




Updated 1st December 2004


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