Consuming Drugs: Soft Drugs, Colonialism and Slavery

What is a drug? Is harmfulness the criterion of legality and illegality of substances, or does power construct their legal status regardless of harmfulness? The chapter examines these questions by focusing on the social construction of drugs. That is, the cultural, contextual and political processes that determine the legal or illegal status of substances alongside how these definitional dynamics are linked to state and corporate imperial power and harms. Drawing on cultural criminology, it explores how meanings of drugs and drug control are constantly being shaped by power, discourse, and resistance, particularly within the context of contemporary media-saturated, consumerist societies. The chapter challenges dominant discourses on drugs by focusing on sugar (a legal psychoactive substance), whose production and consumption are not constructed as deviant or criminal. The case study of sugar reveals how legal substances can cause far-reaching harm. Through a contrapuntal, decolonial lens, it traces sugar’s entanglement with European colonial expansion, slavery, extractivism and global capitalism, revealing the historical and ongoing violence obscured by its legal status. The chapter illuminates the exploitative and harmful foundations of the international legal trade of soft drugs, highlighting silenced histories and contemporary injustices perpetuated by the Global North.