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 CinemaTelevision.
Marezs 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 1930s; 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.