Chasing Dragons: Security, Identity and Illicit Drugs in Canada (review)

Are policies on illicit drugs tools to produce and reproduce (part of) the nation's self-description? Is a drug prohibition the result of a process of securitizing the boundaries of the nation's "Self "? Is the criminalization of drug users the end product of a politics of exclusion through which ideas about what it is to be Canadian are defined and enforced? In Chasing Dragons, Kyle Grayson answers all these questions in the affirmative. The book de-centres law in favour of an analysis of the "mutually constitutive" (p. 43) practices of identity and security and thus breaks with more conventional approaches to the study of the criminalization of drugs. It is indeed a new proposition in this field to interpret the birth and evolution of drug prohibition in Canada as "political decisions determined largely by the security dictates of establishing a distinct Canadian identity" (p. 5).

Chasing Dragons uses an array of conceptual tools to analyse what would conventionally be studied under the heading of law and society. This conceptual work is done in the second chapter of the book; the analytical tools laid out in this ambitious chapter will unfortunately be only partially mobilized in the subsequent analysis. Suggesting a "post-material approach to security" (p. 44), Grayson approaches security as the result of a discursive process of "securitization" and treats identity as devoid of any non-discursive foundation. Invoking authors such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, J.L. Austin, and Giorgio Agamben, and building heavily on the work of David Campbell, Grayson sees identity and security through the dual lens of performativity and performance. The focus on the discursive leads him to refuse the idea that "objective verifiable knowledge" (p. 59) exists and to suggest a relativist, pluralist, interpretive analysis of the security and identity practices surrounding drug prohibition.

Chasing Dragons provides a well-documented account of the major steps of the evolution of Canadian drug laws, from the prohibition of opium in 1908 to contemporary debates around the regulation of medical marijuana. It shows (as have other works before) how Canada was a key player in the internationalization of drug prohibition in the West. This reminder is useful in an age of "collective amnesia" (p. 93) when drug policies are used by the mass media and the political system to assert Canada's cultural superiority over the United States. For example, Chasing Dragons interprets the drug prohibition in its geopolitical context as a strategy through which the nation could solidify its own "(inter)national identity" (p. 74). The domestic context, in particular overt racism and economic anxieties, is interpreted as providing a ground for specific forms of identity and security building. This is a slightly new interpretation, but here Grayson generalizes both too little and too much. He generalizes too much in that the engine driving legislative activity (despite Grayson's reservations on causality and reality) is taken as always operating to perform both a particular identity and a pre-given idea of security. Yet is there ever only one national identity, and only one vision of security? Moreover, identity and security, while obviously two important tropes surrounding law-making processes and representations of law, do not saturate them. In addition—and this is where Grayson generalizes too little—the criminalization of practices and conditions (e.g., possession) related to drugs may well perform "a Canadian identity," but they are also a reflection of, if we take the author's framework, the definition and enforcement of a "Western Self." That is, limiting the roots of Canadian drug prohibition to domestic performances of identity and security obscures the similitude in cultural, geopolitical, socio-political, and juridical rationales for the emergence and solidification of prohibitionist regimes across the Western world.

Chasing Dragons selectively deploys uses of (now) illicit drugs to show the novelties and continuities in cultural (mis)representations of drug users, from the depictions of Asian opium dens as threats to a racialized Canadian identity to the depictions of...