Drugs, Willpower, and the Colonial Biopolitics of Addiction in Vietnam

Abstract

This article examines the early twentieth-century transformation of the opium addict in colonial Vietnam into a distinct category of person, diseased and in need of special forms of intervention. Braiding together French and Vietnamese discourses around drug use and its social consequences, the article traces the development of a specifically colonial biopolitics of addiction. While the proliferation of both legal and illegal drugs came to signify different kinds of risk for French and Vietnamese audiences, this article argues that the coalescence of these discourses around the notions of willpower and self-determination nevertheless represented a powerful new assertion of state and social control over the body of the addict.