Spirit and being: interdisciplinary reflections on drugs across history and politics

Abstract

Few commodities are as global as drugs. Cannabis, opium, heroin, amphetamines, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), khat, psychedelic cacti and mushrooms as well as an interminable list of other natural or synthesised substances travel and are consumed around the globe for all possible reasons. Human migration, trade, cultural trends, medical practice, political repression: together they constitute the drug phenomenon today – and indeed in much of human history. In this, drugs are spirit-like commodities, their value resting upon a fundamental ambiguity made up of individual, psychological, social, cultural, economic and medical circumstances. Defining a drug is an attempt at defining a spirit on the edge, which metamorphoses in time and space. At the same time, drugs remain a fundamentally political object. They are substances controlled by states, through mechanisms of policing, legitimated by judicial and medical evaluation, condemned often on moral grounds. Situated between a fluid social existence and a static legal dimension, drugs can become inspiring hermeneutic objects of study.