Ecologies of drug war and more-than-human health: The case of a chemical at war with a plant

Rhodes, Tim; Harris, Magdalena; Sanín, Francisco Gutiérrez; Lancaster, Kari

doi:10.1016/j.drugpo.2020.103067

Cited by 13 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 66 publications

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“…In the United States, for example, the notorious Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 set out mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine as differentiated from powder cocaine which led to vastly longer prison terms for Black people over white people. Living within this "contaminated diversity", to use Anna Tsing's (2012) term, as employed by Rhodes et al (2021) in relation to coca eradication in Columbia, an ecological approach to drug use tries to take account of drug environments and policies as they become-with humans. As Vanessa Agard-Jones (2013 reminds us in her ethnographic work on pesticide use in Martinique: "at every scale in our social and biological worlds, contingent forms of non-life and life are being entwined, as synthetic chemicals embed, accrete, and leave their residue in our bodies" (2014, no page).…”

Section: Background: Chemical Species and Ecologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chemical species: the art and politics of living with(out) drugs after addiction

Dennis

2022

BioSocieties

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We live within and are made up of ever-changing chemical flows. Witnessing a “chemical turn” in the social sciences, this article asks what a chemical reading of drugs and bodies can offer an understanding of drug dependency and recovery. Where chemicals render bodies “molecular” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), they open them up to more intimate forms of connection that extend our understanding of drug–body relationships beyond limiting categories such as addiction. Rather than a chemical drug entering a biological body, there are chemical interactions that expand the boundaries of where one ends and the other begins. While chemicals have long been a preoccupation in neurological models of addiction, they are seldom taken up in sociological studies of these concerns. Drawing on a series of body-mapping workshops with people in drug recovery/treatment in London, UK, to track these chemical bodies, this article explores the art of living a chemically transformed life. This is an art that thinks with Isabelle Stengers’ (in Stengers and Savransky, 2018) notion of the word to include “not paying attention” as a mode of “paying attention to what may lurk” in living with the ongoing effects of drugs in unequally entangled worlds.

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Section: Background: Chemical Species and Ecologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%