The War on Drugs and Harms
Invisible Victims
Zemiology and Digital Black Market
Abolition and digital drug markets
Several decades of scholarship have documented these failures, yet the intellectual frameworks underpinning drug research have changed remarkably little.
Much of the literature continues to revolve around familiar binaries—criminalisation versus legalisation, punishment versus treatment, repression versus reform—and older theoretical paradigms such as moral panic, deviance amplification, deterrence, strain theory, or medicalisation.
The result is a field intellectually rich but conceptually stagnant. While critical scholars have exposed systemic harms, the analytical tools used to explain and challenge those harms remain grounded in 20th-century thinking.
This stagnation contrasts sharply with real-world transformations in drug consumption, distribution, and policing. The emergence of digital drug markets (DDMs), crypto markets, encrypted messaging systems, cryptocurrencies, and decentralised platforms has radically altered the landscape of drug distribution.
These markets operate outside traditional territorial control, complicate law-enforcement efforts, reduce street-level violence, and create novel forms of online self-governance.
Yet existing research tends to describe these developments rather than situate them within broader socio-political transformations such as platform capitalism, algorithmic governance, abolitionist movements, and structural critiques of state-generated social harm.
This dissertation argues that contemporary drug scholarship requires a new conceptual framework that moves beyond the limitations of traditional criminology. It proposes Cyber-Abolitionist Zemiology, an original theoretical model integrating four key perspectives
Zemiology – shifting the analytical focus from crime to social harm, with special emphasis on the harms generated by state actors and prohibitionist policies.
Cyberocriminology – examining how digital environments reshape drug distribution, governance, resistance, and harm.
Abolitionist Criminology – challenging the assumption that drug policing and punitive enforcement are necessary or reformable and instead situating them as forms of structural state violence.
Speculative Criminology – developing new conceptual spaces to imagine post-drug, post-policing, and technologically mediated futures.
By bringing these fields together, this thesis provides an innovative way to understand how digital drug markets function not merely as sites of illicit commerce but as decentralised, technologically mediated systems of resistance that counteract state-generated harm.
It further argues that these markets illustrate emerging possibilities for drug futures in which policing is obsolete, harm is reduced through digital governance structures, and drug consumption becomes safer, more transparent, and more autonomous.
To the extent possible, providers should not share private patient information with police or state agencies. Healthcare professionals should understand the implications of reporting positive drug tests and suspicion of use and should work to change these policies where possible and inform their patients of them.
Providers can ensure that their patients who use drugs have access to evidence-based, non-coercive harm reduction and treatment options in addition to robust and supportive primary healthcare.
Healthcare professionals involved with medical education and licensure can work to ensure that all students graduate with a deep understanding of SDOH and the impact of the drug war on individual and community health.
Lack of a coherent theory of cyber-drug resistance
This Article has analysed the War on Drugs as a social phenomenon. It argued that such an analysis, which rejects the assumption that collective, institutionalized behaviour is generally rational, can help us understand key aspects of why we continue to marginalize disadvantaged individuals.
If the War on Drugs is a war and wars are won or lost, there is no question we lost. Whatever drug- related evil it sought to eradicate, the data clearly shows that “drugs won.” Along the way, we nonetheless persisted – and largely still do.
To state that we lost is unhelpful and insufficient. If the War on Drugs never worked, more salient questions are to be asked about why we fought it. This Article has posited that the War on Drugs is not about drugs, crime, or addiction: it is about us. It is about why we cede to fear, anxiety, and irrationality.
It is about why we stigmatize and hurt the most vulnerable. Like other irrational and counterproductive policies, the War on Drugs is not an anomaly. It bears close resemblance to other wars we fought (and fight) against the disempowered: witches, gays, Muslims, and others.
Because of the social, economic, and health effects of drug policies, the work of ending the drug war cannot be situated within criminal legal reform efforts alone. The drug war and a punitive drug war logic impact most systems of everyday life in the U.S., subjecting people to surveillance, suspicion, and punishment and undermining key SDOH, including education, employment, housing, and access to benefits.
Combined, these have resulted in poorer health outcomes for individuals, families, and communities, particularly for people who use drugs. These policies and practices, while race neutral as written, are not.
The targeted effects on people of colour further entrench health and economic disparities. As the public and policymakers call for a health approach to drug use, it is vital to recognise how systems meant to care and support are often unable to serve their intended purposes; rather than help people who use drugs or are suspected of using drugs, they frequently punish them.
Healthcare
In their day-to-day practice, healthcare professionals must understand the deep roots of the drug war as well as their role in both perpetuating and undermining drug war logic and practices. Healthcare providers can treat people who use drugs with dignity, respect, and trust and ensure that healthcare and treatment decisions are made in partnership with individuals.
Medical professionals can also work to situate drug use within a larger social and economic context , understanding that drug-related harms often stem from lack of resources – like housing and food precarity, economic insecurity, and insufficient healthcare – rather than from drugs themselves.
Treatment need not be the only antidote for people who experience drug-related harms but should be one option among an array of health services, resources, and support.
At the mezzo- and institutional levels, healthcare providers can advocate to shift hospital and programmatic policies around drug testing, mandatory reporting, and collaborations with law enforcement.
As outlined in this paper, drug testing is not an effective monitoring strategy for care and support, but rather, it is more often a punitive tool of surveillance. If drug testing cannot be eliminated, at the very least, patients should have the right to understand the implications of drug testing and provide explicit consent for the test.
