Crackdown, Capitalism, and the Logic of Dependency
By J. André Faust (July 31, 2025)
My good friend Tony Tracy recently published a compelling review of Garth Mullins’s new book Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs. Tony and I go back to our days of activism in the International Socialist Organization in the 1990s and in student politics, so I was naturally curious to read his thoughts. His review is powerful, and Mullins’s work clearly serves as both memoir and manifesto, an urgent call to confront the state violence and systemic injustice that fuel the drug war.
Tony highlights Mullins’s lifelong activism, his role in user‑led movements like VANDU and BCAPOM, and his refusal to tell a conventional “recovery story.” Instead, Mullins presents a narrative of resistance, centring drug users as agents of change, not passive victims. Tony frames the book as a revolutionary testament, an “essential weapon of resistance” against criminalization and oppression.
Why Tony’s Review Resonates
Tony captures what makes Mullins’s work so important. The book situates drug prohibition in its racist and classist origins, critiques disastrous policies like British Columbia’s 2014 Methadose switch, and celebrates grassroots harm‑reduction strategies. These are all vital issues, and Mullins’s voice, rooted in lived experience, is essential to the fight for safe supply, decriminalization, and user autonomy.
Looking Beneath the Surface
While I agree with Tony’s perspective, my own lens looks deeper at the mechanics that drive both capitalism and the illicit drug industry. At their core, both systems thrive on creating dependency to sustain profit and power. Corporations market addictive products, cultivate brand loyalty, and even build obsolescence into consumer goods. Drug cartels similarly exploit chemical dependency, maintaining control through profit and coercion.
Even artificial intelligence: These systems all share the same underlying logic: create demand, foster dependency, and maximize profit “by any means necessary.”
Money, Power, and the State
What fascinates me is how money, power, and the State reinforce each other. Sometimes this is deliberate, through lobbying, policy capture, or outright corruption. Other times, it simply emerges from the nature of the system itself. Capital generates wealth, which captures political influence. The State enforces laws that protect those flows of capital, whether for corporations or, indirectly, for cartels. Power then reinforces the structures that keep wealth concentrated at the top.
The opioid crisis offers a stark example. Companies like Purdue Pharma aggressively marketed highly addictive drugs with state approval until the crisis became politically untenable. Meanwhile, illicit drug networks flourish in places where the State is weak, complicit, or selectively permissive. Both legal and illegal markets operate according to the same logic: profit through dependency.
A Complementary Perspective
Tony and Mullins are absolutely right to focus on state violence and the harm done to drug users. Harm reduction, decriminalization, and user‑led activism are vital steps toward saving lives and empowering communities. What I extend the conversation to recognize is that even if prohibition ended tomorrow, the exploitative profit structures might remain intact. Power could simply shift from cartels to corporations like Big Pharma.
Understanding this helps bridge our two perspectives. Mullins’s work shines a light on the urgent need to dismantle punitive drug laws and support grassroots activism. But a full critique must also ask how capitalism itself, legal or illicit, thrives on dependency, shaping human behaviour for the sake of profit.
Reflecting on Tony’s review reminded me that confronting the drug war is one part of a larger struggle. To truly liberate people from exploitative systems, we need to challenge not just prohibition, but the more profound logic of money, power, and the State that makes such systems possible in the first place.
