The Global Nexus of Drug Cultivation

It is a pleasure to write the closing chapter for this volume. My tasks are to present some common themes in these diverse studies, point out the unique features, and reflect on our roles as researchers of plant-based drugs and the people who produce, distribute, and use them. The research behind this volume is extraordinary. Doing fieldwork about drugs is risky. Almost every situation described here involves illicit activities. Growers, traffickers, and merchants of these substances have every reason to be suspicious about the researcher, and they have been both generous and trusting in revealing their worlds to us. In turn we hope that our interpretations will benefit these people, not by condoning what is illegal, but by offering enlightened counsel to decision makers who should act with the best information on the human dimensions and costs of their policies, thereby reducing some of the harm done by actions based on ignorance or incomplete information. Regardless of whether or not we approve of what they do, we must marvel at the extraordinary resourcefulness of these people, particularly the peasant farmers at the base of the drug enterprise. As Steinberg (chapter 6) notes, these seemingly conservative people are amazingly flexible and adaptable to the changing world around them. And one cannot help but admire the fortitude in their labors. Westermeyer (chapter 3) describes the work of Laotian opium harvesters as “pressured, repetitive, prolonged, and grueling. Thousands of bulbs rapidly incised and scraped, incised and scraped every day, day after day, from twilight to dusk—sometimes even at night by torch—for weeks.” Their efforts are typical. This is a volume about indigenous peoples and drugs, and it is much more. It offers insight into the drugs themselves, their production and marketing, their unique place in the process of globalization, the physiological impact of their use, their spiritual and perceptual dimensions, their impact on landscapes, and their role in social and political change, as well as the drug war and alternatives to conventional drug warfare. These studies represent work that, as Mathewson (chapter 1) has written, is “immense, compelling, and critically important.”