Troubling Drug Law, Political Participation and Human Rights: A Dope Sick Ontology

In recent years, enthusiasm for the role of human rights in shaping global drug policy has grown. Many argue that human rights can guide urgently needed drug policy reforms and instigate less punitive approaches to people who use drugs. To progress human rights-based reforms, international experts have issued guidance on what rights-compliant drug law and policy would look like. This way of thinking about both human rights and law emphasizes law as text and relies on a version of human rights as immaterial, transcendent, disembodied, and capable of realization through seemingly objective processes of definition, classification, and reason. This way of understanding law is troubled, however, by recent spatial and material turns in legal scholarship, including approaches that emphasize law and matter as co-constitutive. Situating ourselves within these spatial and material legal realms, this paper explores a different conceptualization of the relationship between human rights and drugs, focused on movement and political participation. Drawing on 30 interviews we conducted with human rights experts and activists, many of whom also identify as people who use drugs, as well as Daniela Gandorfer's matterphorical approach to law (2019, 2020) and Margaret Davies’ (2017) work on law unlimited, we examine entanglements of rights, law, drugs, bodies, borders, methadone, doors, prescriptions, languages, suits, airplanes, and security scanners. Through these entanglements, we introduce a “dope sick ontology,” drawing on the slang term used in some drug circles. Repurposing “dope sickness,” we argue that the realization of legal rights, including the rights to freedom of movement, association, and political participation, depends on assemblages of human and non-human bodies. We argue that this way of thinking about how human rights “work” has important implications for rethinking the relationship between human rights law and drug policy, and for how we conceptualize justice.