Book Review: Law, Drugs and the Making of Addiction: Just Habits
| Author | Simon Flacks |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663920909483 |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Centring femicide in her analysis of the ‘necropolitical’ wars in Mexico, Estevez uses
the ‘racial Other’ to explain for the violence against women: political disenfranchised
and unemployed Indigenous men are the cause of the rape, murder, and trade of women
in Mexico. This somewhat pathological view of Indigenous poor men as unequivocally
sexistandviolentwouldseemtoreify the representation of the Endriago subject.
According to Estevez the racialisation and dehumanisation authorised by the War on
Drugs motivates men to become hitmen and gang members ‘and why as part of their
human capital they use rape and feminicide against women’ (2018: 109). What is
missing in this analysis is any discussion of gender and sexuality. Who are considered
men here and indeed who are being considered women? Estevez does not describe the
type of women that are violated and killed, whether they are young or old, family to the
men or strangers, Indigenous or of the Mexican citizenry; for example violence against
trans women are not discussed in this chapter.
A particular danger with the concept of racialisation (of being turned into Other or
non-being) is that race is understood as interchangeable and replaceable as the objects
they subsume to represent. Shelly and Howell on post-apartheid South Africa take the
supposedly declining political relevance of racial signifiers as reflective of the resur-
gence of the drugs as an organising principle. Fransiska on Indonesia goes even further to
posit drug users as the ‘new categories of people’ (2018: 181). This presupposes drug
users are separate from racial groups and would seem counter to the aims of the book.
‘What bindsus all’, Pettus claims, ‘metropolis and peripheryalike – is what our separate
identitieshave in common:the prospect of losingthe biological foundationsof our very lives
and well-being on this planet’ (p. 208). Such an affirmation reduces community to the
experience of violence predetermined on biology as the natural order of our relations to
each other. Following Oy`er ´onk´eOyˇew`
um´ı (1997), perhaps what we need to loseis the bio-
logics that governour lives if we want to commune together – the human and non-human.
And then may ‘drugs’ not be conceived as outside the body but states of us.
CARSON COLE ARTHUR
Birkbeck, University of London
References
Da Silva DF (2007) Toward A Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Koram K (ed.) (2018) The War on Drugs and The Global Colour Line. London: Pluto Press.
Oyˇew `
um´ı O (1997) The Inventi on of Women: Making An African Se nse of Western Gender
Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
KATE SEEAR, Law, Drugs and the Making of Addiction: Just Habits, 1st ed. London: Routledge, 2019,
pp. 182, ISBN 9781138324633, £120 (hbk).
It is somewhat of a curiosity that, given the obvious association, scholarship on drugs,
addiction and the law remains relatively sparse. It is true that the disciplines of
934 Social & Legal Studies 29(6)
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