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2017, London: Hurst Pubishers
From hallucinogenic mushrooms and LSD, to coca and cocaine; from Homeric warriors and the Assassins to the first Gulf War and today’s global insurgents — drugs have sustained warriors in the field and have been used as weapons of warfare, either as non-lethal psychochemical weapons or as a means of subversion. Łukasz Kamieński explores why and how drugs have been issued to soldiers to increase their battlefield performance, boost their courage and alleviate stress and fear — as well as for medical purposes. He also delves into the history of psychoactive substances that combatants ‘self-prescribe’, a practice which dates as far back as the Vikings. Shooting Up is a comprehensive and original history of the relationship between fighting men and intoxicants, from Antiquity till the present day, and looks at how drugs will determine the wars of the future in unforeseen and remarkable ways.
Routledge Handbook of Intoxicants and Intoxication Edited ByGeoffrey Hunt, Tamar Antin, Vibeke Asmussen Frank, London-New York: Routledge, 2022
Since ancient times, psychopharmacology has fueled armed conflicts and sustained fighting men. The presence of psychoactive substances in warfare has taken on two general forms: (1) combatants have consumed various intoxicants recreationally, and (2) drugs have been “prescribed” by military authorities as force multipliers for the improvement of combat performance. The chapter offers a general overview of these two modes of “war by intoxicants” yet with the main focus on the latter. It discusses the particular purposes of the military use of drugs, namely to inspire courage and provide relief from the stress of battle; overcome fatigue and enhance performance; lessen the effects of war on the psyche; maintain morale and cohesion; and kill the boredom and monotony of military life. Aiming to draw a broader picture of battlefield drugs, it also explores another military role for them: as offensive psychochemical non-lethal weapons. Disorientation, indecisiveness, hallucinations, seizures, and other similar intoxication-induced effects offer potential military capacity. Thus, the efforts to weaponize toxic plants and psychoactive agents (such as atropine, opium, cannabis, or LSD) attempted to confuse, disrupt, or immobilize an enemy, or subvert and overpower their surrounding populations.
Snoek, A. (2015). Among Super Soldiers, Killing Machines and Addicted Soldiers: the Ambivalent Relationship between the Military and (Synthetic) Drugs. In J. Galliott & M. Lotz (Eds.), Super Soldiers (pp. 95–106). Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. In this paper we will analyze several cases from the American Civil War, the two World Wars and the American Vietnam War, and contemporary research in enhancement substance, to determine how drug use can be analyzed and understood in both physical and moral (ethical) terms. This will require a discussion of drug use at different levels. First, we will address the consequences of drug use for the physical and mental sanity of soldiers, during and after wartime, irrespective of the reason for drug use. Second, we will look into the moral questions related to drug use for the enhancement of soldiers, that is, as a method for modern warfare. The moral dimension has at least two different angles: (i) the moral responsibility of superiors administering drugs to their inferiors who are exposed to the rule of full obedience, and (ii) the ethical consequences of enhancement for moral judgment by soldiers in the gray zone between acts of war and war crimes (the difference between the Super soldier and the Killing machine).
2021
There is growing alarm over how drugs increasingly empower terrorists, insurgents, traffickers, and gangs. But by looking back not just years and decades but centuries, Peter Andreas reveals that the drugs-conflict nexus is actually an old story, and that powerful states have been its biggest beneficiaries.
2019
Throughout history, at times, the politicians, media, and anti-drug activists have constructed the intimidating image of homecoming addicted soldiers as ferocious "others" who would spread narcotic epidemics and threaten the social order. This chapter looks at one of such cases: American soldiers who served in Vietnam were stigmatized as "others" for being excessive drug users. Massive and habitual consumption of drugs during the Vietnam War was contextual and usually did not continue after these soldiers returned home. But some media, politicians, and intellectuals created the myth of the "addicted army" which was used to blame soldiers for the nation's inability to win the war. The Vietnam veterans were victimized; the public began recognizing them as dangerous "Others", as junkies who would spread an epidemic of narcotic use across the United States. What is more, the image of the druggie veteran created a moral panic that was used to i...
Pharmakon. Concept Figure, Image of Transgression, Poetic Practice, 2018
The current chapter looks back at a case of pre-prohibitive drug-use in the 19th century where drugs and, in particular, hashish served as instruments of psychiatric research. This Rausch experience was meant to remove the division between experiencing and experimenting, between subjective and objective knowledge. Other boundaries were also blurred in the course of these experiments: the boundary between inebriation and sobriety, and consequently the boundary between mental illness and normal health. We will observe that Moreau de Tours’ experimental project, if we are to take it and its epistemological implications seriously, led him to a re-evaluation or, rather, requalification of an experience which was stigmatized as madness. The purpose of this text, which on first reading may appear to be a critique of Moreau’s psychiatric approach, is primarily to celebrate his research and the motto which inspired him: “In order to know how a madmen loses reason one must have lost reason oneself!” At issue is an event in the history of psychiatry, as well as in the history of drug use, which questions the disqualification of experiences that matter. Is it possible, one might ask, to celebrate or reinterpret practices in ways that can make a difference? Could Moreau’s project relating to “madness” teach us, for example, to cultivate a sensitivity to practices which are typically subject to simplification? Such simplification seems to be inherent in any claim to a pharmakon’s ‘true’ definition, which inevitably disregards the pharmakon’s real exigency, a “culture of usages,” that is, by definition, impure and multifaceted.
Medical Anthropology Quarterly , 2020
In 2006, the United States Department of Defense developed for the first time official criteria for the use of psychopharmaceuticals “in theater”—in the physical and tactical spaces of military operations including active combat. Based on fieldwork with Army soldiers and veterans, this article explores the transnational and global dimensions of military psychopharmaceutical use in the post-9/11 wars. I consider the spatial, material, and symbolic dimensions of what I call “pharmaceutical creep”—the slow drift of psychopharmaceuticals from the civilian world into theater and into the military corporate body. While pharmaceutical creep is managed by the U.S. military as a problem of gatekeeping and of supply and provisioning, medications can appear as the solution to recruitment and performance problems once in theater. Drawing on soldiers’ accounts of medication use, I illuminate the possibilities, but also the frictions, that arise when routine psychopharmaceuticals are remade into technologies of global counterinsurgency. [global pharmaceuticals, psychiatric medications, psychiatry, U.S. military, U.S. empire]
Medical Anthropology , 2016
The unprecedented reliance today on psychiatric drugs to maintain mission readiness in war and to treat veterans at home has been the subject of ethical debate in the United States. While acknowledging these debates, I advocate for an ethnography of how US soldiers and veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars themselves articulate political and ethical tensions in their experiences of psychiatric drug treatment. Detailing one army veteran’s interpretations of drug effects as narrated through the lens of his current antiwar politics, I examine the radicalizing transformations of self and subjectivity that he attributes both to his witnessing drug use in Iraq and to the neurochemical effects of his own medications. Playing on the biomedical notion of “side effects,” I highlight surprising political and ethical openings that can surface when psychopharmaceuticals and war intersect. Psychotropic medication use offers a critical realm for furthering the ethnographic study of the lived tensions and contradictions of military medicine and medicalization as revealed in militarized embodied experience.
Medical History, 1996
The history of drugs, as the contributors to this comparatively slim but handsomely-produced collection of essays remind us, is one of ambivalence, contradiction and uncertainty. To quote from the title of Ann Dally's essay, "anomalies and mysteries" abound. For every positive ...
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