Neoliberalism, racism, and the war on drugs in Canada.

• Date: 22 March 2006
• Author: Gordon, Todd
• Published date: 22 March 2006
• Author: Gordon, Todd

Introduction

THE "WAR ON DRUGS" IS AN IMPORTANT FEATURE OF NEOLIBERALISM IN CANADA. Yet while the relationship between the drug war and neoliberal policy has been the subject of focus by writers in the United States (see, for example, Parenti, 1999; Davis, 1992), it has received little attention in the literature on either drug policy or neoliberalism in Canada. This article seeks to address this gap. Using a political-economy framework, it highlights the central role played by drug prohibition in the street-based operationalization of neoliberal restructuring and links this policing dynamic to the historical role drug criminalization has played in Canada. The failure to interrogate capitalist state power and to adequately situate the emergence and development of the war on drugs in Canada within the context of the state's racialized efforts to produce capitalist social relations considerably flattens most analyses thus far advanced on this issue.

The war on drugs, it will be argued, is bound up with a deep-seated racist fear of the non-British immigrant Other. This fear is rooted in part in the Canadian state's concern that immigrants--whose cheap labor Canadian capitalism has historically been very dependent upon--will not conform to, and thus will undermine, Canada's white bourgeois moral order. A central historical role of the state and police has been the constitution of immigrants (and workers in general) as a reliable and disciplined class of wage laborers dependant on market relations. In the process, certain drugs came to represent to the state and police a potential threat to this order. The concern was that these drugs might provide a financial or festive alternative (or sometimes both) to alienating market relations. Equally important, however, the danger associated with these drugs became even greater when they were identified with a particular non-British immigrant community, as opiates, cocaine, and cannabis were in the early 20th century. Drugs in these instances were a possible alternative to market relations and a cultural practice from a supposedly less civilized part of the world that was foreign to most white Canadians. This was therefore viewed as a serious expression of nonconformity to, and a potential infection of, the country's white bourgeois moral order. These dynamics framed drug criminalization in the early 20th century and are played out even today, as the emergence of neoliberalism has entailed the deep re-imposition of market relations into people's lives and Canadian capitalism's increasing dependence on cheap immigrant labor from the global South. Thus, the war on drugs remains a very important means for the state and police to pursue order in immigrant communities.

The article will first examine the historical role of the capitalist state in producing a racialized bourgeois order in immigrant communities. Then it briefly looks at the emergence of drug prohibition in Canada in the early 20th century as a racialized project of class domination. Some of the existing literature on the early period of drug criminalization in Canada is helpful, though its insights are strengthened by the discussion of antiracist state theory that precedes it. Having developed a historical framework for the war on drugs, I then explore its contemporary manifestation, drawing out its most salient patterns and relating them to the demands of neoliberalism. Finally, I look specifically at the criminalization of khat, and with it the Somali community in Toronto. This is similar in important ways to the criminalization of specific immigrant communities in the early 20th century as part of the war on drugs and cannot be properly understood outside this context.

The State, Immigration, and Canada's Threatened Bourgeois Moral Order

Critical studies of the historical development of Canada's ongoing war on drugs must seriously consider the historical role of the state in general, and the police in particular, in producing bourgeois order, as well as the concerns on the part of the state, the police, and moral reformers over non-British immigrants--whose labor is key to the successes of Canadian capitalism--as they pursued that order. This may shed greater light on why certain drugs and specific communities have been criminalized historically, and why there is such a strong fear of non-British immigrants underlying drug policy. After all, drug criminalization has not occurred in a vacuum. It has been a state policy that intersects profoundly with the racialized class relations of Canadian capitalist society.

Neocleous' (2000) history of the emergence of modern policing in early 19th-century Britain provides helpful insights into the production of bourgeois order and the state's concerns with disorder and social contamination that are at the heart of drug policy in Canada. The modern, or "new" police were established, according to Neocleous, to produce bourgeois order, which is premised upon the constitution of a market in wage labor (i.e., the commodification of labor power) and the subordination of the working class to the demands of capitalist accumulation. Work, and specifically wage work, has come to be understood in moralistic terms. An important measure of a person's moral standing in our society, for instance, is their industry and their ability to hold down a job. Failure to do this often suggests, to the state and police, a person's potential for criminality. (1)

Thus, this bourgeois order has a very moralistic character, and central to policing historically is the maintenance of a moral order through the imposition of market relations on people. Police patrolling workplaces and public spaces (streets, parks, bars--the "proletarian public sphere") were charged with the task of eradicating alternatives (financial or festive) that working people sought to market relations and the drudgery and exploitation of wage work, and this remains the focus of policing today (Gordon, 2005). In pursuit of this task, the "new" police became very preoccupied with issues of sanitation and cleanliness. As Neocleous (2000: 85) argues, during the period of the new police "the metaphors of pollution and moral contagion became the standard form of expression of social commentary." For social reformers and new police theorists, property, order, and cleanliness were clearly and intimately connected to poverty, dirt, disease, and crime. Though social reformers and police were concerned with sanitation in heavily populated working-class areas, the dirt and refuse for them also denoted something about the class that lived in those conditions. Identification was made between the state of the working class and the sanitary level of working-class neighborhoods, expressed in the use of words such as "residuum, refuse, offal," which referred to "the sewage waste that constituted the sanitary problem and the human waste that constituted the social problem" (Neocleous, 2000: 86). Even today, police jargon is marked by the identification of the poor/potential criminal with dirt and refuse through terms like "scum" or "pukes" (Neocleous, 2000: 87; Ericson, 1982: 79). Thus, the task of police was to clean the streets physically and morally. Valverde (1991) offers a similar history of the movement for moral reform and its relationship to issues of working-class cleanliness and order in Canada in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (2)

Neocleous identifies the focus of the new police on sanitation with a concern with the working class in general, but fails to cite its racial dynamics. McNally (2002: 123) argues, however, that the anxieties surrounding bodies, cleanliness, and moral and physical pollution in bourgeois culture are extremely racialized, and this has shaped state policy and policing practices. Important here is the contradictory attitude of the Canadian state (and of other settler states) toward immigrants, which is a central and defining moment of Canadian society from its inception: the urgent need for cheap, non-British immigrant labor was accompanied by a fear of the perceived threat from immigrants to the country's bourgeois order. The Canadian state and moral reformers racialized non-British immigrants as nonwhite and of inferior stock. This process derived from modern notions of white racial superiority and was also bound up with the peasant background of many of these immigrants and their unfamiliarity with the rhythms and disciplinary and hygienic norms of industrial capitalist society (McNally, 2002; Bannerji, 2000; Sharma, 2001; Brannigan and Lin, 1998). Racialization helped to justify the super-exploitation of immigrants, while fueling concerns that they would not be compliant laborers and might morally or physically infect the rest of Canadian society, particularly white workers.

Among the central components to racist psychology are the attempt to attain whiteness and thus respectability by intensifying "the internal psychic repression that is part of industrial capitalism--the subordination of desires for recreation, drink, festivity, sex, and social celebration to employers' demands for a sober, industrious, and disciplined workforce" (McNally, 2002: 122)--and the projection of these desires onto other social groups that have not achieved whiteness and respectability. Racist projection expresses the aspiration to fulfill the (very bodily) desires sacrificed to achieve respectability within the capitalist social order and the distancing of oneself from those desires and the primitive or uncivilized Other who has come to embody them. This is manifested in an anxiety around the body itself: its smell, dirt, and different "physical productions" (Neocleous, 2000: 86; McNally, 2002: 123). Although this is true of peoples' attitudes toward their own bodies and physical desires, it was even more profound with respect to whites' views of the racialized Other. The further the imperial reach of Europe...