Biopower and Control: Foucault & The War on Drugs

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Abstract

In 1970, the United States enacted the Controlled Substances Act. This act reshaped the United State’s approach to substance regulation from one of cautious, tacit acceptance and regulation to a domestic war. This shift quickly became encoded into societal consciousness, and marked an epistemological turn which thrust into the public realm substance use as wrong in itself. This turn in consciousness towards control of substances through societal discipline and legal enforcement via regulation satisfies both prongs of Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower.
This paper seeks to establish the relevance and importance of Foucault in understanding the American front of the War on Drugs. The argument follows two stages; first employing a Foucauldian lens developed from History of Sexuality, Birth of Biopolitics, and Security, Territory, Population, it will reconstruct the history of American drug policy from the 1910s to the 1980s, from substance use being absent from the broader public consciousness to disallowed as a matter of fostering a unified conception of life. This is to argue that the socio-political reframing of substance use constitutes biopower. Second, I will then defend this interpretation through a direct application of Foucault, and discuss this expression of biopower in terms of socio-juridical control and domination. Interrogating the conflict will provide insight into the nature of societal attitudes around substance use and illuminate the underlying power structures of prohibition both for users, the public at large, and the drugs themselves. I then conclude with consideration of contemporary shifts in public opinion and legal reforms.

Author

• Andrew Kaplan, Independent Scholar