Pharmaceutical pacification: Racialized superhumanization and low-intensity social war

Connecting patterns of legal drug consumption and the policing of illicit drug markets, this article aims to implicate both in a broad, sometimes imperceptible system of pacification. As deployed here, pacification describes a range of material and ideological tools, techniques and practices used by the state to secure and reproduce capitalist social order. Using drugs to transform pained, depressed and exhausted subjects into contented consumers, and likewise, drug laws to police, punish or eliminate dangerous subjects altogether, pharmaceutical pacification offers an understanding of state power that transcends typical distinctions between legal/illegal, foreign/domestic and the violence of war and police. To elaborate our claims, we employ an object-centered analysis tracking the tangled history of two closely related drugs—phencyclidine (PCP) and ketamine—from their syntheses to their current use by state agents and non-state entrepreneurs, demonstrating the ways pacification operates through the drug war and individual market relations simultaneously.