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by Salvador Santino Regilme
Oct 11 2025
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The global war on drugs is sold as a common-sense protection of public order (Pansters 2018; Pozen 2024; Regilme 2020). In practice, however, it has functioned as a transnational mode of governance that concentrates coercive power, militarizes everyday life, and corrodes democratic oversight across state-society relations (Andreas 2019; Regilme 2025a; Robinson 2020; Regilme 2025b). From Colombia to the Philippines, prohibition through militarized punishment has been exported and institutionalized through security assistance, training, and conditional aid, with donor states prioritizing “order” over rights while recipient elites consolidate authoritarian control (Regilme 2018; Lindsay-Poland 2018; Regilme 2021; Koram 2022a). The result is not safer societies but increasingly unaccountable security bureaucracies and widespread state-led violations of human dignity (Bartilow 2014; Simangan 2018; Sandvik and Hoelscher 2017).
This punitive regime persists because it pays political and economic dividends. It converts social anxiety into obedient consent, reframes poverty as criminality, and delivers budgets, careers, and patronage to police and military institutions (Regilme 2025b; Alexander 2010; Bartilow 2019; Koram 2022b). It also works as a smokescreen, shifting blame away from oligarchic inequality, dispossession, and transnational financial interests by recoding structural crises as pathologies of “deviant” individuals (Cruz 2017; Pansters 2018; Franko and Goyes 2023). For donor states, the drug war creates durable leverage over client governments; for authoritarian incumbents, it disciplines racialized and impoverished groups through dehumanization and moralizing narratives that narrow citizenship and normalize a punitive common sense.
My core argument states that the drug war is not a domestic policy misstep but a global authoritarian project sustained by unequal political economies and external complicity (Amnesty International 2017; Pozen 2024; Regilme 2025b). The empirical record underscores this claim. Global indicators underscore the policy failure. After a decade of intensified enforcement, global illegal drug use still rose by roughly 31% from 2009 to 2016 (International Drug Policy Consortium 2018), while punitive laws continue to crowd prisons, with an estimated 2.2 million people incarcerated for drug offenses worldwide and about 470,000 detained for simple possession (Penal Reform International 2022). In the United States alone, drug-related overdose deaths reached over 106,000 in 2021(National Institute on Drug Abuse 2023). These figures sit uneasily beside official narratives of success and affirm my core claim that prohibition’s coercive architecture reproduces harm while rationalizing intensified state power.
Continue to topics in the article:
The Drug War as Global Export
Militarism and the Erosion of Democracy
Human Rights in Retreat
Authoritarian Internationalism
Toward a Post-Drug War Future
References
www.e-ir.info
Oct 11 2025
Download PDF
The global war on drugs is sold as a common-sense protection of public order (Pansters 2018; Pozen 2024; Regilme 2020). In practice, however, it has functioned as a transnational mode of governance that concentrates coercive power, militarizes everyday life, and corrodes democratic oversight across state-society relations (Andreas 2019; Regilme 2025a; Robinson 2020; Regilme 2025b). From Colombia to the Philippines, prohibition through militarized punishment has been exported and institutionalized through security assistance, training, and conditional aid, with donor states prioritizing “order” over rights while recipient elites consolidate authoritarian control (Regilme 2018; Lindsay-Poland 2018; Regilme 2021; Koram 2022a). The result is not safer societies but increasingly unaccountable security bureaucracies and widespread state-led violations of human dignity (Bartilow 2014; Simangan 2018; Sandvik and Hoelscher 2017).
This punitive regime persists because it pays political and economic dividends. It converts social anxiety into obedient consent, reframes poverty as criminality, and delivers budgets, careers, and patronage to police and military institutions (Regilme 2025b; Alexander 2010; Bartilow 2019; Koram 2022b). It also works as a smokescreen, shifting blame away from oligarchic inequality, dispossession, and transnational financial interests by recoding structural crises as pathologies of “deviant” individuals (Cruz 2017; Pansters 2018; Franko and Goyes 2023). For donor states, the drug war creates durable leverage over client governments; for authoritarian incumbents, it disciplines racialized and impoverished groups through dehumanization and moralizing narratives that narrow citizenship and normalize a punitive common sense.
My core argument states that the drug war is not a domestic policy misstep but a global authoritarian project sustained by unequal political economies and external complicity (Amnesty International 2017; Pozen 2024; Regilme 2025b). The empirical record underscores this claim. Global indicators underscore the policy failure. After a decade of intensified enforcement, global illegal drug use still rose by roughly 31% from 2009 to 2016 (International Drug Policy Consortium 2018), while punitive laws continue to crowd prisons, with an estimated 2.2 million people incarcerated for drug offenses worldwide and about 470,000 detained for simple possession (Penal Reform International 2022). In the United States alone, drug-related overdose deaths reached over 106,000 in 2021(National Institute on Drug Abuse 2023). These figures sit uneasily beside official narratives of success and affirm my core claim that prohibition’s coercive architecture reproduces harm while rationalizing intensified state power.
Continue to topics in the article:
The Drug War as Global Export
Militarism and the Erosion of Democracy
Human Rights in Retreat
Authoritarian Internationalism
Toward a Post-Drug War Future
References
The Global War on Drugs as Authoritarian Statecraft and Its Human Rights Costs
Prohibition's coercive approach enables authoritarian statecraft, consequently undermining democratic governance that is necessary for human rights.
www.e-ir.info
