Junk international: the symbolic drug trade

Junk international: the symbolic drug trade

Spectacular value-adding between third-world production sites and first-world retail marketplaces; the entrapment
of indigenous workers in cycles of low-pay dependence and
intimidation; ruthless profit maximization; the easy penetration of sovereign economic zones; altered social
habits and habitual consumerism in such zones; the flow
of untaxable cash from local economies to off-shore finance
centers; local franchising as the agency of aggressive, transnational cartels or monopolies - all these characterize globalization. They also describe the processes
of the international drug trade, the commerce in 'junk', which William S. Burroughs recognized in The Naked Lunch (1959) as the very model of a colonizing capitalism at
its most efficient pitch.

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