Caring for coca, living with chemicals: Towards ecological harm reduction.

In this paper, we show how the materialisation of chemical harms linked to the cultivation of coca and its processing into coca paste reside in a wider politics of structural violence which is also situated ecologically. Drawing on the qualitative interview accounts of coca farmers in Putumayo, Colombia, we attend to practices of care in the field and in the laboratory. We look first at chemicals used in coca's cultivation (herbicides, fertilizers, pesticides), and second at chemicals (such as sulphuric acid, sodium carbonate, magnesium permanganate) used in the processing of coca leaf into paste (before the paste is sold on for refinement into cocaine). Our analysis highlights the tensions which inevitably arise in the balance and multiplicities of care - for crops, livelihood, and environment. We trace how farmers' narratives of the neutralisation of chemical risks habituate chemical harms as mundane, even uneventful, in an economic imperative to 'carry on as normal' in the coca economy. We emphasise health and harm as matters of care which not only affect humans but living environments. Accounts of 'risk environment' can give insufficient attention to Nature, and this leads us to consider 'ecological harm reduction'.

Critical policy frontiers: The drugs-development-peacebuilding trilemma.

Recent years have seen the emergence of a policy consensus around the need for fundamental reforms of global drug policies. This is reflected in the call for 'development-oriented drug policies' that align and integrate drug policies with development and peacebuilding objectives, as captured in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These calls have been important in acknowledging the damage caused by the war on drugs and in drawing attention to how drugs are inextricably linked to wider development and peacebuilding challenges. Yet there is surprisingly limited academic research that looks critically at the drugs-development-peace nexus and which asks whether the goals of a 'drug-free world', 'sustainable development' and 'the promotion of peace' are commensurate with one another, can be pursued simultaneously, or are indeed achievable. This articles studies these policy fields and policy-making processes from the geographical margins of the state - frontiers and borderland regions - because they offer a privileged vantage point for studying the contested nature of policymaking in relation to the drugs-development-peace nexus. We set out a historical political economy framework to critically assess the assumptions underlying the integrationist agenda, as well as the evidence base to support it. By developing the notion of a policy trilemma we are critical of the dominant policy narrative that 'all good things come together', showing instead the fundamental tensions and trade-offs between these policy fields. In exploring the interactions between these policy fields, we aim to advance discussion and debate on how to engage with the tensions and trade-offs that this integrationist agenda reveals, but which have to date been largely ignored.

Ecologies of drug war and more-than-human health: The case of a chemical at war with a plant.

Drawing on an ecological approach, we trace how the political-economy of drug wars are locally materialised in relation to health. We take the case of coca cultivation and eradication as our example. To make our analysis, we trace the different ways that the chemical glyphosate is materialised in a war with the coca plant in Colombia. Glyphosate has been used for decades in aerial fumigation campaigns to eradicate illicit coca cultivation. Our analysis traces the more-than-human effects of glyphosate in relation to health. This leads us to outline a more-than-human approach to harm reduction; a harm reduction which positions health as a matter of ecology, paying attention not only to the nonhuman actors affecting human health but also to the health of environments which are themselves always in-the-making. We envisage harm reduction as a collaboration in which humans 'become-with' their environments.