AGAINST "LEGALIZATION"
By Hakim Bey
As a writer, I am distressed and depressed by the suspicion that "dissident media" has become a contradiction in terms - an impossibility. Not because of any triumph of censorship however, but the reverse. There is no real censorship in our society, as Chomsky points out. Suppression of dissent is instead paradoxically achieved by allowing media to absorb (or "co-opt") all dissent as image.
Once processed as commodity, all rebellion is reduced to the image of rebellion, first as spectacle, and last as simulation. (See Debord, Baudrillard, etc.) The more powerful the dissent as art (or "discourse") the more powerless it becomes as commodity. In a world of Global Capital, where all media function collectively as the perfect mirror of Capital, we can recognize a global Image or universal imaginaire, universally mediated, lacking any outside or margin. All Image has undergone Enclosure, and as a result it seems that all art is rendered powerless in the sphere of the social. In fact, we can no longer even assume the existence of any "sphere of the social. All human relations can be-and are-expressed as commodity relations.
In this situation, it would seem "reform" has also become an impossibility, since all partial ameliorizations of society will be transformed (by the same paradox that determines the global Image) into means of sustaining and enhancing the power of the commodity. For example, "reform" and "democracy" have now become code-words for the forcible imposition of commodity relations on the former Second and Third Worlds. "Freedom" means freedom of corporations, not of human societies.
From this point of view, I have grave reservations about the reform program of the anti-Drug-Warriors and legalizationists. I would even go so far as to say that I am "against legalization."
Needless to add that I consider the Drug War an abomination, and that I would demand immediate unconditional amnesty for all "prisoners of consciousness"-assuming that I had any power to make demands! But in a world where all reform can be instantaneously turned into new means of control, according to the "paradox" sketched in the above paragraphs, it makes no sense to go on demanding legalization simply because it seems rational and humane.
For example, consider what might result from the legalization of "medical marijuana"-clearly the will of the people in at least six states. The herb would instantly fall under drastic new regulations from "Above" (the AMA, the courts, insurance companies, etc.). Monsanto would probably acquire the DNA patents and "intellectual ownership" of the plant's genetic structure. Laws would probably be tightened against illegal marijuana for "recreational uses." Smokers would be defined (by law) as "sick." As a commodity, Cannabis would soon be denatured like other legal psychotropics such as coffee, tobacco, or chocolate.
Terence McKenna once pointed out that virtually all useful research on psychotropics is carried out illegally and is often largely funded from underground. Legalization would make possible a much tighter control from above over all drug research. The valuable contributions of the entheogenic underground would probably diminish or cease altogether. Terence suggested that we stop wasting time and energy petitioning the authorities for permission to do what we're doing, and simply get on with it.
Yes, the Drug War is evil and irrational. Let us not forget, however, that as an economic activity, the War makes quite good sense. I'm not even going to mention the booming "corrections industry," the bloated police and intelligence budgets, or the interests of the pharmaceutical cartels. Economists estimate that some ten percent of circulating capital in the world is "gray money" derived from illegal activity (largely drug and weapon sales). This gray area is actually a kind of free-floating frontier for Global Capital itself, a small wave that precedes the big wave and provides its "sense of direction." (For example gray money or "offshore" capital is always the first to migrate from depressed markets to thriving markets.) "War is the health of the State" as Randolph Bourne once said-but war is no longer so profitable as in the old days of booty, tribute and chattel slavery. Economic war increasingly takes its place, and the Drug War is an almost "pure" form of economic war. And since the Neo-liberal State has given up so much power to corporations and "markets" since 1989, it might justly be said that the War on Drugs constitutes the "health" of Capital itself.
