Illegal drug markets in transitional economies

Abstract

The rise of illegal drug markets in transitional economies is usually conceptualized as an effect of economic transition. With the emergence of new understandings of transitional economies and contemporary thinking about global capitalism, drug markets can be understood to have a different function. In global capitalism, the illegal drug market is an apparatus of capture that choreographs a quest for pleasure, liberation, freedom and the hope for consumption promised by global media. Capitalism thrives on its own incorporative processes such that the limitative becomes constitutive. Global capitalism is defined by the dissolution of limitative boundaries such as sovereign borders, sovereign bodies, sovereign ethnic groups, and the subsequent deformation/reformation of the very boundaries to commodity markets. Illegal drug markets mediate this function through capturing bodies, markets, dreams of freedom, and the social order and subsuming them to productive capital. In transitional economies, the illegal drug market is both an effect of transition and a cause. Illegal drug markets create the possibilities for a market economy based on the capture and mobilization of affects; the introduction of new forms of consumption, and the redirection of flows of capital in an environment where capital flows are malleable and labour markets are easily re-defined. Rather than being parasitic, the modern illegal drug market is constitutive of modern liberal democracies emerging from transitional economies. The roles of harm reduction organizations are discussed in light of this theory.