Much of the criticism of prohibition talks about the ‘war on drugs’ as a war on Black and Brown people, a war on the poor, and a war on people who use drugs. While true, this is missing an important part of the picture. Less has been said about how the legal and political system that makes drug wars possible originally came about: colonisation.
In a paper published this year, I explore how drug policy can better incorporate Indigenous arguments and demonstrate solidarity with First Nations communities most harshly impacted by drug laws.
Colonisation and the legal system
To begin, it is important to discuss the ways that Indigenous intellectual traditions talk and think about colonisation and colonial violence. This starts with the basic premise that “settler colonisers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event”. Here, the act of dispossession is not located just in the moment of invasion, but also in the legal and social fabric of states that occupy stolen land.
Take the example of what is now called Australia; those who invaded and colonised this place had no permission to do so. The legal justification used for dispossessing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from their land was treating the land upon which European colonisers arrived as ‘terra nullius’, or land belonging to nobody. The absence of “civilised” people upon land legitimised its occupation and the death or exile of those living on it. The legal principle of terra nullius was overturned by the highest court in Australia in 1992, recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people’s connection and rights to land.
Read the full article:
Prohibition, Colonisation, and Undermining Indigenous Rights
The Coloniality of drug prohibition
Abstract
There have been several recent commentaries which have highlighted the relevance of the postcolonial perspective to drug prohibition and called for the decolonisation of drug policy (Daniels et al., 2021; Hillier, Winkler & Lavallée, 2020; Lasco, 2022; Mills, 2019). While these are significant interventions in the field, sparse drugs scholarship has engaged more directly with well-developed literature and concepts from Critical Indigenous Studies (Moreton-Robinson, 2016) and Indigenous Standpoint Theory (Moreton-Robinson, 2013; Nakata, 2007) and reflected on its applicability to the drug and alcohol field. In contrast to the postcolonial perspective, which understands colonisation as a historical event with contemporary impacts, Indigenous scholarship conceptualises colonisation as an active and ongoing part of how the settler-state continues to impose itself. From this vantage point I explore coloniality as a system of power and reflect on the way prohibition acts as a key arm of the settler-colonial state. The paper explores the way concepts like vulnerability, marginality, overrepresentation, disproportionality and addiction involve colonial violence, knowledge practices and narratives which are central to the way coloniality is maintained and continues to assert itself in contemporary settler societies.
