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An appreciation of the social function of the concept of drugs is essential for understanding the moral panic they engender. Despite only emerging as a concept over the course of the twentieth century, drugs have come to be seen not as mere plant life in the manner that they appear in nature, nor are they seen as commodities, natural resources to be exploited for capitalist gain. Drugs instead function as the primary example of what anthropologist Michael Taussig calls ‘transgressive substances’. Within the conceptualisation of prohibitionist law, drugs are not taken as the standard commodity to be exploited by humans for profits but instead are feared as phantom commodities that have the power to rule their creators. Drugs become not just objects but pathways, seen to facilitate movement between states of being, transferring its consumers from the realm of the human to the non-human. This article examines prohibition’s engagement with the everyday life of drugs to open up how the concept’s theoretical grounding is anchored in a law-making violence that seeks to cleanse an idealised imagination of the social.

Phantasmal commodities: law, violence and the juris-diction of drugs