The drug wars, or massacres, in Mexico seem interminable, and irresolvable. The subject of a recent (11 July) TIME magazine’s cover story, details about the nature and extent of the human cost accompanying this apparently ineradicable scourge of Mexican society are almost too horrific to register consciously. (I know what some readers will say: so are the violent crime statistics in South Africa — indeed.) In the past five years, according to Time, about 40 000 Mexicans have lost their lives through gang murders alone. In Time there is a poignant photograph of some 70 empty graves on the side of a Juárez graveyard, already dug in anticipation of the next victims of the drug wars — testament to the inability of humankind to break this violent cycle once and for all.
“The US helped create this beast …”, says Tim Padgett/Durango in Time, “… Americans consume $65-billion worth of illegal drugs annually, roughly what they spend on higher education, and most of those drugs are either produced in Mexico or transit through it. The US is also a primary source of the weapons the cartels use to unleash their mayhem … 70% of the guns seized in Mexico in the past two years were smuggled from north of the border.”
It defies comprehension that a society can be so at war with itself that human life appears to have literally lost ALL value — even when a superficial take seems to explain it, simply, in terms of the colossal profits on the part of the druglords — until one turns to psychoanalysis for some understanding. At the recent International Society for Theoretical Psychology conference in Thessaloniki, Greece, David Cuéllar of the Michoacana de San Nicolás University in Mexico offered his audience just such a psychoanalytic interpretation of this utterly reprehensible socio-economic phenomenon.
Cuéllar spoke of Freud’s claim, that discontent is inherent in culture, no less so capitalist culture than any other, given the renunciation of the (life) drives that is required for work (and culture) to be accomplished. Reciprocally, culture — or language as the bearer of culture, which alienates humans from nature as the “real” — creates a “desire” on the part of humans that cannot, in principle, be satisfied, because humans have lost the unreflective fusion with being that their forebears (and they, as infants) presumably once had.
On the other hand, the “needs” that exist in culture may seem to be subject to satisfaction through food, sex and commodities, he further reminded his audience, but the latter are not satisfying in any enduring manner. And in capitalist culture, specifically, the commodities that are produced, ostensibly to satisfy these needs, are subject to a double “un-satisfaction”: because obsolescence is built into them, they are “designed” to create dissatisfaction almost as soon as they have been used, and the prospect of a “better” or “later” model (of cellphone, for instance) presents itself. It requires no genius to see how this need-satisfaction illusion applies to “hard” drugs, with their promise of oblivion, albeit short-lived, from the reality of the uncompromising workaday world.
Within capitalist culture, with its peculiar kinds of discontent, Cuéllar pointed out, drug-use occupies a special position as part of a drug sub-culture, given the impression, created by the availability of drugs, that they can appease the need to overcome the discontent inseparable from capitalist society. “This new discontent”, he intimated, [can be] “… analysed in the context of the subculture that has developed, in Mexico, in order to satisfy the need of drugs in the United States … this need of drugs can only be understood in the context of the capitalist culture and in relation to the subculture of drug dealing and trafficking. The Mexican discontent involved in this subculture might even be advantageously used by psychologists in order to elucidate the American discontent related to the need of drugs. So [he warned] this need must not be individualised, psychologised, abstracted from the system and considered independently from the other devices of the system. There is a deep and close connection between the violent devices of the capitalist system in Mexico and the reflexive need of escaping from this system in the United States.”
If I understood him correctly, what Cuéllar was getting at was that the interlocking, systematically connected “desire” for profit, on the part of competing Mexican drug cartels (and on the part of American crime-syndicates who supply these gangs with most of the weapons they need, like assault rifles), on the one hand, and the demonstrably colossal “need” for drugs in the US, on the other — is a strictly capitalist phenomenon. And from a psychoanalytic perspective, both — desire as well as need — can never be fulfilled, despite the necessarily constructed illusion that they can. To approach the matter as if each individual “case” of drug trafficking and of drug use can be understood or treated in isolation from the capitalist cultural system of which it forms a part, is sheer blindness. The system in its totality must be understood and critically addressed, but there is scant evidence that this is being done (except by a few intellectuals like David Cuéllar).
And so this insane business in, and between, Mexico and the United States carries on, like the repetition-compulsion which manifests Freud’s death-drive, running through its virtually daily cycle of weapons- and drug-supply, drug-use (with all its concomitant problems and destruction of lives), Mexican government and police attempts to arrest or eradicate the drug gangs, retaliation on the part of the latter, and violent deaths aplenty. There are signs that the Mexican people have had enough of this senseless slaughter, but whether their outrage, combined with the Mexican government’s commitment to put an end to it, can succeed in doing so while the deadly embrace between desire for money and need for drug-oblivion exists, is doubtful.
So this is what our tax payer money is being spend on in Greece? It is time to end the needless war on drugs – legalise drugs and get rid of the criminality that goes with it.
No amount of post-modern psychoanalysis babble from a bunch of professors is going to get us anywhere – although is sure sounds like some of them are on LSD & coke.
Ironic then that the father of psychoanalysis was a coke head!
http://www.thedailymaverick.co.za/article/2011-07-23-freud-cocaine-and-the-talking-cure-a-theory
Your one dimensional analysis of the human condition based on Greek philosophy is flawed.
If you open your mind to the great eastern philosophical schools of thought you will come to understand that fundamental nature of all humans is HAPPINESS not “discontent”- whatever that really means as your Greek philosophers claim. You have much to learn about the human condition that you will not find in Greek textbooks!
Then to finger capitalism as the main driver of these “drug wars” is equally confusing and shows your superficial knowledge of these “drug wars”.
The “drug wars” and political upheaval in Central American countries are deliberate attempts to destabilize these countries to plunder their natural resources, courtesy of the US Foreign Policy. This kind of crony capitalism has been fueled by the neo-conservative media like Murdoch ( http://southafricana.blogspot.com/2011/07/dial-m-for-murdoch.html )and the rest of mainstream media to spread the fear of drugs. Heck, even in California, the closest state to Mexico, they have been trying to legalize marijuana for years because they saw right through the “evil drugs” logic used to justify these “drug wars” that can never be won. I’m afraid your need to think deeper about the “drug wars”, dear professor!
Amy Whitehouse dies of a drug overdose as a hero and musical icon. Elvis Presley, Charlie Parker, Chet Baker, Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jackson, Janis Joplin, and many (many) others have died under similar circumstances. Society holds them up as examples of how great the human race can be, and yet reviles anyone of a slightly less talented nature who takes (or abuses) drugs.
The hypocrisy of the current attitude towards mind-altering substances is so big it has become something of a proverbial elephant. The implications of actually admitting that prosecuting people for putting things in their own bodies -as opposed to prosecuting them for committing real crimes- are so monumentally large that few people will dare to deal with the matter.
Humans have been escaping from their perceived mediocrity for as long as they have been able to eat and drink.
The so called war on drugs can probably best be embodied by the fact that cocaine has been lumped in with narcotics, because it isn’t.
Until quite recently most drugs, including cocaine were legal and societies seemed to cope quite well with the fact. The cocoa plant has been used as a stimulant for 1000′s of years. Trying to stop people using it by making it illegal is stupid, obviously pointless, and ridiculously expensive.
Apart from that, anti drug legislation criminalizes large portions of societies for no other purpose than to appease a misguided puritan segment within our cultures.
The obvious solution is to legalise drugs and manage the consequences thereof, which have proven themselves to be comparatively insignificant when compared with the consequences of the war on drugs.
HD & Dave H, before writing something that reflects such incomprehension of Cuellar’s analysis as reported by Bert again, you should brush up on your psychoanalysis, and think a bit more historically.
Stephen, you’re right about the escape into oblivion through drugs being as old as humankind (Cuellar and Bert would acknowledge this). But it used to be in a radically different social and economic environment – in some cultures it went hand in hand with religious beliefs in their efficacy to open up a different dimension. Today that context is absent (as exposed so well in Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream). And Freud used cocaine (which was legally available at pharmacies then) very sparingly (a drop or two at a time, at night), to increase his energy for work, i.e. writing, because he knew its properties from reports about indigenous Americans’ feats of exertion when chewing the coca leaf, if I remember correctly.
Robin, you are absolutely right about the legalization of drugs being the appropriate place to start dealing with the problem. But the reason why this is resisted is exactly because it is a capitalist phenomenon: many rich people (druglords, but also bribed government officials, politicians and police) would be “deprived” of their felonious income if it were legalized. If I’m not mistaken, one of the reasons why Eliot Spitzer, discredited governor of New York State, was watched closely for an opportunity to discredit him, was because of his support for the legalization of drugs.
Sorry Bert most of your high brow mumbo jumbo was way above me. As someone who visits the US often and most times spend time in San Diego the basic problem (as Stephen Browne explains) is the ultra liberal post modern culture of no absolute right and wrong, truth is what you want it to be. The truth is that the US hunger for drugs, spurred on by the liberal and Hollywood anything goes/freedom culture is the problem. The US Govt and private society spend billions every year in ‘moral/non war’ ways to stop smoking, stop global warming etc etc etc, must be hundreds of causes mainly identified by the liberal ruling elite that the US spends billions on. However let anyone try to moralise about hard drugs and they are buried in a tsunami of hate and post modern scorn.
The solution is simple, everyone of leadership (starting from Obama) or moral standing (sport stars, film stars etc) should publicly and often urge younsters to not start drugs and it should be a subject in school. With no market the drug lords have nothing.
Last, please next conference you go to please get non capitalist to pay for it or at least get one speaker to give a different view to what is obviously a one sided diatribe against free market mutli party democrcy.
Brent
Wow, such angry comments. I think Bert simply raised the interesting point that the capitalist system is the driver for both the violence and the drug use.
I would like to point out that it is probably because capitalism is NOT allowed to flourish in a free-market manner in this case that we have this problem and not simply because of capitalism as a system. If narcotics were legal, big drug companies would get involved. They would refine the formulas, reduce the risks and the price. There would be no huge margins for the drug oligarchy to make, no risk that the takers were receiving rat poisen, the prisons would empty and in fact, using tax, the drugs more beneficial to society could be made cheaper (might be better to have people on E, the ‘love drug’ for example than on alcohol, tik or hard opiates).
There would be no reason to smuggle drugs in at high profits due to high risks, no gangs needed to distribute and no money going into criminal networks. More cash would be available for managing drug abuse (it exists whether legal or not), more research would be possible in the open and massive numbers of people accused of drug offenses could be freed from prisons saving more money.
All that is needed is someone with the political balls to do it.
Drugs is a matter of choice, anything we do have consequences. One does not require a Phd in logic but have to distinguish between right from the age of 3. This has been proofed it can be done. ECD is the most important stage of any human being. The sooner all little ones are granted the privilege to be taught by responsible caring mentors loads of youth problems will be prevented.
The drug war is more of a problem than drugs themselves. End the drug war, and you destroy the cartels.
If we can accept and tolerate a drug as destructive as alcohol (which really is by far the most socially destructive and dangerous drug), then I don’t see why we can’t tolerate people wrecking their lives with other chemicals. And, if there was no black market there’d be less money to incentivise the creation of more dangerous drugs.
More naive questions that are probably too low-brow and straightforward to deserve an answer:
1. Given that The System in its totality must be understood and critically addressed, is it possible to isolate capitalist culture from non-capitalist culture?
2. If so, what is our benchmark for a non-capitalist culture? Communal cultures pre-industrialisation, perhaps?
3. Would non-capitalist cultures, in the absence of desires as noted, be drug-free?
I shall refer you to Peyote and the history of whaling as starting points.
It appears that both drug abuse and exploitation of resources in a communal, non-private ownership sense pre-date capitalist culture as we know it, and are often measurably worse in absence of the profit motive with its focus on efficiency.
It should also be noted that the Mexican Drug Wars, while bloodthirsty, are part of the underworld in both Mexico and America and are not representative of their respective cultures. Legal industries such as the porn industry and Hollywood constitutes far more in terms of both turnover and their references in popular culture.
@Ladyfingers:
That’s a very good point. One can also compare this with abortion, which has far more lethal repercussions in countries where it isn’t legal than in countries where it is legal. Not sure how capitalism fits into making babies, but if you’re biased enough you don’t need to back up your claims.