This paper reviews evidence of how drug control has been used to uphold colonial power structures in select countries. It demonstrates the racist and xenophobic impact of drug control policy and proposes a path to move beyond oppressive systems and structures. The ‘colonization of drug control’ refers to the use of drug control by states in Europe and America to advance and sustain the systematic exploitation of people, land and resources and the racialized hierarchies, which were established under colonial control and continue to dominate today. Globally, Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples are disproportionately targeted for drug law enforcement and face discrimination across the criminal system. These communities face higher arrest, prosecution and incarceration rates for drug offenses than other communities, such as majority populations, despite similar rates of drug use and selling among (and between) different races. Current drug policies have contributed to an increase in drug-related deaths, overdoses and sustained transnational criminal enterprises at the expense of the lives of people who use drugs, their families and greater society. This review provides further evidence of the need to reform the current system. It outlines a three-pillared approach to rebuilding drug policy in a way that supports health, dignity and human rights, consisting of: (1) the decriminalization of drugs and their use; (2) an end to the mass incarceration of people who use drugs; (3) the redirection of funding away from ineffective and punitive drug control and toward health and social programs.

Recent critical legal scholarship has shown the significance of colonialism for emergence of modern international law.1 Paralleling, sometimes interweaving, with this post-colonial/decolonial reading has been a “religious turn” in which scholars highlight the persistence of the theological-political within the ostensible secularity of law.2 Frantz Fanon has much to offer both lines of scholarship. This article revisits the work of Fanon so as to illuminate the significance of his understanding of colonized/racialized identities as “damned” for contemporary juridical scholarship. Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre, when read alongside the canonical literary account of the “fall,” John Milton’s Paradise Lost, offers an account of the juridico-theological process constructing an ideal of “humanity” through turning particular subjects into deific surrogates and others into the “damned.” This article develops understandings of postcolonial/decolonial international law, international law and political/juridical theology as well as critiquing the “humanitarianism” of contemporary international legal discourse. Moreover, it helps to establish the necessity of reading Fanon as a thinker of cross-disciplinary significance.

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An appreciation of the social function of the concept of drugs is essential for understanding the moral panic that they engender. Despite only emerging as a concept over the course of the twentieth century, Drugs have come to be seen not as mere plant life in the manner that they appear in nature, nor are they seen as commodities, natural resources to be exploited for capitalist gain. Drugs instead function as the primary example of what anthropologist Michael Taussig calls 'transgressive substances.' Within the conceptualisation of prohibitionist law, drugs are not taken as the standard commodity to be exploited by humans for profits but instead are feared as phantom commodities that have the power to rule their creators. The concept of drugs through the law imbuing existing plant life with the phantasmal powers to able to use and consume the human subject as opposed to allowing humanity to use and consume it. Drugs become not just objects but pathways, seen to facilitate movement between different states of being, transferring its consumers from the realm of the human to the nonhuman. This article examines prohibition's engagement with the everyday life of drugs to open up how the concepts theoretical grounding is anchored a law-making violence that seeks to cleanse an idealised imagination of the social.