PROOF ONLY OPEN PEER COMMENTARIES “It’s a War on People …” Jarrett Zigon University of Virginia What do certain military missions in Afghanistan, domestic spying in the United States, therapeutic interventions in Russia and Denmark, torture and rape in an Indonesian police station, and Stop and Frisk policing in New York City all have in common? The answer is that they are just a few of the local and situated manifestations of the global phenomenon named the drug war. Having roots in the 19th century and gradually emerging throughout the 20th, the drug war was officially “declared” in 1971 by Richard Nixon and only became a full-blown global war in the 1980s, when it became militarized and intertwined with the Cold War through initiatives of the Reagan and then Bush administrations. Today what is named the drug war is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths a year globally, and the social and political “death” or exclusion of many more (e.g., “World Drug Report 2014” (UNODC 2014, 3); Drug Policy Alliance website). But the drug war has potential effects that go well beyond these numbers. Whether by means of military interventions, policing and incar- ceration strategies, international and national surveil- lance, and the overblown budgets to pay for them; or by means of biopolitical therapeutics, national and international legislation, and the normalization of labor regimes and discipline, all of which and more constitute aspects of the drug war, this is a war that potentially affects every human on the planet. How can the drug war have such widespread effects and how can we ethically and politically respond to it? In my book A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community (Zigon 2019; see also: Zigon 2015), I offer an answer to this question. 1 Importantly, we must begin by recognizing that the drug war should not be conceived as something like a singular policy issue or a totalized strategy, and nei- ther should it be limited, as it often is in public dis- course, to its localized manifestation in parts of Colombia, Mexico, or American inner cities. Rather the drug war is best conceived as a non-totalizable and widely diffused complex phenomenon that mani- fests temporarily and locally across the globe. Therefore, while I entirely agree with the important and necessary argument and policy suggestions made by Earp, Jonathan, and Hart (2021), ultimately their intervention is limited by its singular focus on the United States and policy-oriented remedies. I take my lead in this argument from those very people who are both most affected by, and most actively fight against, the war on drugs. For over a decade I did ethnographic research with what I call the global anti-drug war movement, which is primar- ily led by active users of such hard drugs as heroin and crack cocaine. They know well that the drug war cannot simply be thought in terms of policy and law. Rather, as one of their mantras—“nothing about us without us”—entails, to end the drug war we must first understand how it shapes the lives and experien- ces of drug users. This is why the most sustained effort to end the drug war is led by active drug users themselves. “It’s a war on people, it’s a war on communities, it’s a war on entire segments of cities.” This is how a New York City anti-drug war activist once described the drug war to me, and how it is understood and articulated by innumerable other such activists around the globe. When representatives of governments, states, and international institutions speak of the drug war, they speak as though it is a quasi-metaphorical description of the benevolent attempt on their part to protect national and global populations from appar- ently dangerous substances. This rhetoric suggests that the war is waged on these substances, and this, along with the medicalization of the disease model of addic- tion and its therapeutic treatment, results in the con- temporary dominant discourse of the war on drugs as 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 ß 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC CONTACT Jarrett Zigon jz8h@virginia.edu University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 22903-1738, VA, USA 1 This commentary is based on excerpts from that book, as well as the 2015 article “What Is a Situation?”. THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF BIOETHICS https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2021.1891335