International Journal of Drug Policy 82 (2020) 102794

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International Journal of Drug Policy

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/drugpo

Research Paper

Opioid Ontopolitics: Industrial Capitalism, Metabolic Rift, and the Power of T

Things
Sasha Breger Bush (Ph.D.) (Assistant Professor)
⁎

Department of Political Science, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO, USA

ABSTRACT

What does the global drug economy look like? In this essay, I operationalize a thing-centered ontology and the concept of “metabolic rift” to describe and analyze the
global opioid economy. With a specific focus on opium, morphine, heroin and fentanyl, I combine theoretical insights from new materialism, political economy and
ecology, and environmental sociology and then use these tools to organize and analyze data on opioid production and consumption drawn from a wide variety of
academic fields and traditions. In this context, I develop and leverage the concept of “ecological Taylorism” to describe the relationships between people and poppies
under industrial capitalism. I argue that it is critical for us to think about drug production and drug use/consumption as social-ecological relationships between
human and non-human agents. Not least, I find that relaxing ontological assumptions about what it means to have power in the economy permits the drugs
themselves to ask questions back to us as scholars. Do we produce drugs, or do drugs produce us, or both? Do we consume drugs, or do drugs consume us, or both? Is
there a Golden Rule in relationships between people and things—do the things with which we interact do to us what we do to them?

By Sasha Breger Bush
“The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities or aspirations.
He wishes and longs as earnestly as ever to realize what he believes
possible, and feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual ap-
prehension of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of
execution only, but even of power to attempt. He lies under the
weight of incubus and nightmare; he lies in sight of all that he would
fain perform, just as a man forcibly confined to his bed by the mortal
languor of a relaxing disease, who is compelled to witness injury or
outrage offered to some object of his tenderest love: he curses the
spells which chain him down from motion; he would lay down his
life if he might but get up and walk; but he is powerless as an infant,
and cannot even attempt to rise.”
-Thomas De Quincy (1821)
Introduction
Anyone who has ever consumed a drug—and I mean this broadly to
include things like coffee and Red Bull and Tylenol and cigarettes and
whisky and Adderall as well as drugs like opium and heroin and cocaine
and methamphetamine—knows that drugs have power. And, yet, most
of the existing scholarship on power and drugs in the social sciences
tends to focus on the power of people. In fact, to learn about the power
of drugs, and the plants and animals and rocks and other things from
which they are fashioned, it is necessary to dig into the harder sciences.
Here, drugs and plants and rocks and animals are all carefully con-
sidered and categorized for their powers and properties, but always
with a consistent eye toward human exploitation and use that reveals
the objectified and subjugated status of the things under study.
What appears initially as a problem of disciplinary (epistemological)
divides in the drug context is actually more than this. Lurking beneath
these academic research silos is a deeper and more consequential set of
ontological assumptions about what kinds of things can rightfully be
considered “agents” with power who act in the world. Bennett notes
about the power of things, “Thing-power perhaps has the rhetorical
advantage of calling to mind a childhood sense of the world as filled
with all sorts of animate beings, some human, some not, some organic,
some not. It draws attention to an efficacy of objects in excess of the
human meanings, designs, or purposes they express or serve (2010,
20).” Below, I operationalize this ontological perspective— i.e., “a more
distributed account of agency in which the human subject is not
alone”— to help me organize and critically analyze data on the global
opioid economy (Rhodes et. al. 2019, 1621).
What does the global drug economy look like? Ontological as-
sumptions about who/what has power present obstacles for thinking
about drug economies, and often result in analyses that are overly fo-
cused on the role of human institutions, such as the state, in the
economy (see also Breger Bush and Kriese 2019). The major questions I
ask as a political economist in any given context are about what the
economy looks like, how and by whom and to what ends power is ex-
ercised within it, and how humans like me can affect change in this

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: sasha.breger@ucdenver.edu.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2020.102794

0955-3959/ © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

S. Breger Bush
context. But in the drug arena, and many others too, those with “power”
are almost always human. Even in critical drug studies that focus
squarely on dynamics of industrial capitalism—as I also do below—it is
often the case that the conversation leaves non-human nature out of the
conversation almost entirely (e.g. Bourgois and Schonberg 2009,
Alexander 2008). In the few studies that do, importantly, focus to some
extent on power in regard to non-human nature in industrial capitalist
context, “nature” figures as an object of human exploitation or some
other kind of object that is ascribed meaning by people (e.g.
Paley, 2014, Pereiria 2010, Keefer and Loyoza 2010, Reith 2019). It is
this troubling ontological disconnect between my own, and many
others’, everyday experiences with drugs on the one hand—i.e. that
they have power—and the current accounting for the drug economy in
contemporary scholarship on the other that is partly driving my theo-
retical and empirical research in this paper. With Padovan, I agree that
“Society is as much biophysically constructed as nature is socially
constituted, even as these constructions and constitutions reveal dis-
tinctive modes of operation” (Padovan 2014, 6). The essay below is an
investigation of power relations between people and nature in the drug
economy context. It is about how and to what end people exert power
over nature, and how and to what end natural things exercise power
over humans, in industrial capitalist systems.
Thinking about drugs and other things as political and economic
agents, and then operationalizing this ontological assumption in em-
pirically grounded, critical political economy research, requires a col-
lection of theoretical tools and data from a wide variety of disciplines
and sources. If I assume that plants, animals, tablets of fentanyl, and the
like are political agents with power, then the drug “economy” becomes
a series of relationships between human and non-human agents who are
exercising power over one another in a complex ecological subsystem.
In thinking this through I have taken elements of the “thing”-centered
and assemblage-based ontological approaches apparent in some recent
scholarship in political and feminist theory, and combined them with
ontological and political economy insights on “social metabolism” and
“metabolic rift” drawn from radical political economy and ecology and
environmental sociology (the first and second sections below). While
the former bodies of theory establish things as political agents, the
latter render the “economy” as a network of relationships among people
and between people and nature. Taking them together, the economy
becomes a complex and dynamic series of relationships between human
and non-human agents. I then apply this ontological approach to
thinking specifically about opioid drug economies—with special at-
tention to opium, morphine, heroin and fentanyl—drawing empirical
data from an array of fields and subfields including history, anthro-
pology, economics, sociology, chemistry, biology, pharmacology, and
forensic science (the third section below). I develop the notion of
“ecological Taylorism”, which describes one way in which industrial
capitalism's ontological perspectives manifest in everyday economic
practices, to connect theory to practice.
This interdisciplinary theoretical marriage, and the subsequent in-
terdisciplinary, empirical application to opioid economies by way of the
concept of ecological Taylorism, are the major contributions I make to
the literature in this essay. In the final section, I conclude with ideas for
future research and interdisciplinary collaboration. Not least, I find that
relaxing ontological assumptions about what it means to have power
permits the drugs themselves to ask questions back to us as scholars. Do
people have power, or do they merely command powerful things? Do
we consume drugs, or do drugs consume us? Is there a Golden Rule in
relationships between people and things—do the things with which we
interact do to us what we do to them? I hope that the rather different
onto-politics I deploy here may help in the future to reframe and mo-
tivate new kinds of drug research and inquiry.
The ontopolitics of things like drugs
My goal in this essay is to apply the idea of “thing-power” to
2
International Journal of Drug Policy 82 (2020) 102794
thinking about drugs and industrial capitalism. While Bennett, from the
perspective of new materialism, sees the need for scholars to “highlight
the active role of nonhuman materials in public life” (Bennett 2010, 2), I
also see the complementary need to consider the active role of humans
in the lives of things, a symmetrical concern derived from an under-
standing of economies as complex relationships among people and
between people and “nature”. While Bennett's work is indeed grounded
in an anti-essentialist politics, one in which the power of people is
substantially decentered and the power of things in human life are
emphasized, I aim to push this a bit further by additionally considering
the power of humans in the “public life” of things. There are obvious
epistemological problems here. As a human myself, I am severely
constrained in my capacity to think about and observe the lives of
things unencumbered by my all-too-human understandings of and as-
sumptions about observation, research, knowledge, analysis, commu-
nication, life, matter, power, energy and so on. For this reason, I do not
attempt to speculate on the private lives of things. Rather, I focus only
on their public lives with humans (and a few other creatures), as best as
I am able to apprehend them, and how living with and relating to hu-
mans affects political agents like the opium poppy.
Bennett articulates the power of things, or their “agency”, in rela-
tional terms: “While the smallest or simplest body or bit may indeed
express a vital impetus, conatus or clinamen, an actant never really acts
alone. Its efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration, co-
operation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces. A lot
happens to the concept of agency once nonhuman things are figured
less as social constructions and more as actors, and once humans
themselves are assessed not as autonoms but as vital materialities”
(2010, 20-21). It appears that Bennett understands power—for ex-
ample, productive power in the economy—as a characteristic of as-
semblages, or, in other words, as a relational attribute or derivative, a
product of things that are combined and recombined with one another
in different ways over time and space. The notion of assemblage in
Bennett's work thus serves as an ontological equalizer: people, like
things, are assemblages.
Writing from a posthumanist standpoint, Andrews and Duff note in
the health context, “Common to most contemporary discussions of
posthumanism is a reconceptualization of the human from something
that is complete and ‘closed’ to something that is incomplete and
‘open’” (2019, 124). Elsewhere, Duff discusses the ontopolitics of as-
semblage in thinking about “health” and the dangers of artificially se-
parating fields of knowledge and social-ecological activity in in-
vestigating health processes and outcomes: “In what Deluze (1994) calls
“actual” or “real experience”, biological, material, affective, social,
semiotic, political and economic forces necessarily cohere in the ar-
ticulation of an assemblage of health. As such, one should never speak
of the social or political context of a particular health condition because
this logic prematurely differentiates forces, processes or bodies without
having first established an epistemological basis for this separation”
(Duff, 2014, 4; see also, e.g., Jensen 2010 for similar perspectives in the
field of science and technology studies, or STS).
In the radical political economy literature, scholars make a point to
think especially about industrial assemblages, or those powerful com-
binations of things that appear particular to industrial capitalist sys-
tems. Complementing Bennett, Andrews and Duff above, the industrial
capitalist system is sometimes distinguished from other types of
economies with reference to its particular ontological vantage point.
Shiva puts this well, deploying the language of “separation” to make
her point, marking an important theoretical through-line between the
thing-centered and assemblage-based ontopolitics discussed in this
section and the radical political economy conversation about industrial
capitalism and social metabolism discussed below (note specifically the
parallels to McClintock's (2010) understanding of metabolic rift out-
lined below in the next section):
The three big separations that have brought us to the verge of
S. Breger Bush
extinction as a species are the separation of humans from nature; the
separation of humans from each other through divisions of class,
religion, race, and gender; and the separation of the Self from our
integral connected being…The first separation, of humans from
nature, creates eco-apartheid. It separates the soil and the earth
from our bodies and our minds. It separates the interconnected as-
pects of nature, dividing it up into fragmented, separable parts to be
exploited, owned, traded, destroyed, wasted (Shiva 2018, 16).
In her work on matsusake mushrooms, Tsing, 2015 similarly thinks
about separation and nature in industrial capitalist context and ties this,
ethically and politically, to the importance of decentering humans in
research on industrial capitalism: “Imagining the human since the rise
of capitalism entangles us with ideas of progress and with the spread of
techniques of alienation that turn both humans and other beings into
resources” (2015, 19).
In the next section I discuss the political-economic context and
dynamics in which the subsequent empirical research on opioids is
embedded—industrial capitalism—using the concepts of “social meta-
bolism” and “metabolic rift” to define economies as complexes of re-
lationships among humans and between human and nonhuman nature.
These concepts are especially well-suited to thinking about industrial
capitalist economies from a more thing-centered and assemblage-based
ontological vantage point and have some special and possibly produc-
tive connections with drugs.
Metabolic rift, social metabolism, and industrial assemblages
Within a variety of heterodox political-economic theoretical tradi-
tions, production, distribution and consumption of goods and services
in the economy are analyzed through the overlapping ontological and
analytical perspectives provided by “metabolic rift”1 and “social me-
tabolism”. Scholarly understandings of Marx's notion of metabolic rift
build off the simple but critical ontological observation that human
economies are complexes of relationships with nature, and that human-
nature relationships (e.g. “social-ecological metabolisms”) change as
economic systems develop across time and space. By extension, com-
modities in industrial capitalist economies, including drug technolo-
gies, are “assemblages” that reflect in microcosm the broader social-
ecological dynamics that create them. As Marx indicates in the Grun-
drisse, technologies are embodied ecological relationships, i.e. con-
cretized human relationships with nature (including human social re-
lations, for we are part of nature too): “Nature builds no machines, no
locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These
are products of human industry; natural material transformed into or-
gans of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature
(Marx 1857, Notebook VII).”
Central to the notion of metabolic rift, and echoing Shiva and Tsing
above, is the observation that the development of industrial capitalism
has caused a profound disruption or “rupture” of ecological processes
that is potentially “fatal” for humanity and many other species besides
(Foster, Clark and York 2010, 14 and 45; see also Foster 1999,
Foster 2000, Burkett and Foster 2006, Foster 2008). My intent here is
not to summarize this broad corpus of scholarship (for a good recent
review essay see White, Gareau, and Rudy 2017). Rather, below I dis-
cuss three features and characteristics of the concept that seem well-
suited, perhaps with some modification and boundary-pushing, to
thinking about drug ontology and drug political economies together as
a piece: its trans-scalar applicability and multidimensionality, its socio-
historical contextual link to chemicals, and its common articulation in
1
“Metabolic rift” comes directly from Marx, with a serious debt owed to
Liebig and his early 19th century work on the nutrient cycle and has thus been
part of political economy conversations for almost two centuries. Interest in this
conceptual framework has revived in recent decades, partly as a response to
growing global concerns about the environment.
3
International Journal of Drug Policy 82 (2020) 102794
terms of “separation” and “tearing” and “rupture”.
First, one of the most seductive features of the concepts of social
metabolism and metabolic rift is that they lend themselves to thinking
about how industrial capitalist relations and logics are reproduced in
complex and contradictory ways at different scales of socio-ecological
activity, and across multiple relational dimensions. In other words,
scholars working in this tradition view social metabolism in industrial
capitalist systems as a process that reproduces industrial capitalist
ontologies across and through many dimensions, literally saturating
social-ecological life with “rifts” and “separations” among people and
between people and nature. In other words, ontology is understood to
be performative. McClintock (2010) perhaps puts this facility of the
framework most formally in detailing three overlapping and mutually
constitutive dimensions of metabolic rift: “ecological rift”, “social rift”,
and “individual rift”.
In his comments on “rescaling metabolism”, McClintock discusses
the spatial dimension of “ecological” rift:
The form of metabolic rift most discussed by scholars is what I refer
to more specifically as ecological rift. According to their arguments,
the imperative of spatial expansion inherent to capitalism has
cleaved a rift between city and country, humans and nature. In
search of new spaces for ongoing accumulation, capital has also
disrupted sustainable biophysical relationships such as nutrient cy-
cles (2010, 3).
As the system addresses the rifts it creates in one geographic location
(e.g. by applying guano to replenish nutrients in depleted soils in
Europe), it displaces the rift into other spaces and dimensions (e.g. as
competition over guano depletes Peruvian resources and starts a war2).
McClintock notes that ecological rifts knit together socio-ecological
processes and relations across space and time: “While a rift in a parti-
cular metabolic process occurs at a particular scale, social metabolism
of nature continues at new spatial and temporal scales as production is
relocated or becomes dependent on new inputs” (McClintock 2010, 4).
In this way ecological rift is shifted and reproduced across and through
different places and moments.
Ruptures in human relationships with non-human nature in the
industrial capitalist context are complemented by ruptures in other
dimensions. “Social rift” occurs in the context of the commodification of
land and labor (McClintock 2010, 6), with, as Marx puts it, the “se-
paration of labor from property” (Marx 1973, 295). From this rift flows
many kinds of social inequality, dispossession, and deprivation. “In-
dividual rift” is theorized more or less as “alienation”: “As a broader
social rift is cleaved by the commodification of land and labour, people
experience an internalized dimension of metabolic rift, which I refer to
as ‘individual rift’. Essentially what Marx called alienation from labour
and from nature, it manifests as the perception of self as external to the
environment” (McClintock 2010, 11).
This trans-scalar and multidimensional feature of the framework is
also apparent in the work of other rift scholars, even if not explicitly so.
Foster, Clark and York in the preface to their 2010 book, for example,
collect together “dying oceans” with “dioxin in every mother's breast
milk” as indicators of ecological rift, intuitively tying together systemic,
household-level, and intra-individual scales. They also emphasize
multidimensionality, arguing, for example, that a “potentially fatal
ecological rift has arisen between human beings and the earth, ema-
nating from the conflicts and contradictions of the modern capitalist
society. The planet is now dominated by a technologically potent but
alienated humanity—alienated from both nature and itself, and hence
ultimately destructive of everything around it” (Foster, Clark and York
2
Dearth of food–A startling view. (1860, Jan 05). New York Times (1857-
1922) Digital Archive. This 19th century op-ed from the New York Times con-
siders guano and Liebig's insights into the nutrient cycle roughly around the
time Marx was writing about metabolic rift.
S. Breger Bush
2010, 14). They similarly link the social and ecological dimensions,
noting that: “This ecological rift is, at bottom, the product of a social
rift: the domination of the human being by the human being. The
driving force is a society based on class, inequality, and acquisition
without end” (Foster, Clark and York 2010, 47).
What is perhaps most interesting for the drug discussion below is
how metabolic rift can perhaps be extended or modified slightly so as to
capture significant features of the global drug political economy.
Namely, the framework creates space to think about two overlapping
issues related to scale and dimension: a. how ecological rifts scale down
to the level of the individual, including how they manifest inside people;
and, b. that the processes by which individual people “internalize”
(exploitative and oppressive) socio-ecological structures may be even
more complex and manifold if we think about the processes of inter-
nalization along more materialist lines (as opposed to the more spiritual
sense in which the term is often used). In other words, positioning drugs
and power ontologically in the context of metabolic rift encourages
thinking about how we quite literally take industrial capitalist tech-
nologies into our bodies, summoning internal rifts that echo and reflect
in complex and contradictory ways the rifts involved in their produc-
tion and distribution at other scales and in other dimensions. Implicit is
an ontological attempt to see economies as relationships, dynamics and
flows, rather than as static social constructs. Also suggested in con-
versations about social metabolism and rift is thus the proposition that
means and ends, processes and outcomes, are deeply connected (the
nutrient cycle, discussed below, provides an excellent example of such
connections).
Second, the historical and social context in which Marx first situated
the notion of metabolic rift indicates potentially productive overlaps
with drugs. Drawing partly on Engels’ discussions of soil fertility and
the natural sciences (e.g. Engels 1844), the early ideas about metabolic
rift that appear in Marx's Capital specifically discuss metabolic rift in the
context of the nutrient cycle (Marx 1975, Foster 1999, Foster 2008). As
depeasantization pushes small landholders off the land and into cities,
the soil is robbed of its fertility, with food and other resources produced
in rural areas transported into cities for consumption by the urban
workforce. Rather than waste returning to the soil following con-
sumption, thereby completing the nutrient cycle, it is expended in cities
as pollution. And it is here that Marx comments in the direction of our
drug inquiry. Referring partly to the work of agricultural chemist Justus
von Liebig, Marx notes that “agriculture no longer finds the natural
conditions of its own production within itself”, and that it requires
“chemical fertilizer acquired through exchange” (in Foster 2008, 96,
emphasis added).
Chemicals make other appearances in conversations about rift.
Speaking to ecological rift at the planetary scale, Foster, Clark and York
discuss nine planetary boundaries (i.e. critical thresholds), respect of
which are essential for a well-functioning ecosystem that can continue
to support human life, and many of which have already been exceeded.
These include “ocean acidification”, “nitrogen and phosphorus cycles”,
“atmospheric aerosol loading”, and “chemical pollution” (2010, 14). In
these various contexts, chemicals and chemical imbalances are figured
as material signifiers of metabolic rift. The possibilities here for thinking
about drugs can be put simply: Might drugs, which are also chemicals,
likewise signify rift in some way? If so, how?
Third, the language scholars use to define and describe metabolic
rift seems rather useful for thinking about drugs, especially when they
are considered as chemical substances derived from natural things like
plants, animals, and rocks. In some places, Marx uses the language of
“separation” to describe metabolic rift, invoking a similar ontological
vantage point to those outlined in the previous section: “It is not the
unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic condi-
tions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appro-
priation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a
historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic
conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation
4
International Journal of Drug Policy 82 (2020) 102794
which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labor and
capital” (Marx in Foster 2008, 95). Foster, Clark and York (2010) use
the language of “rupture”, but also of “tearing”: “Nature can be seen as
a web or fabric made up of innumerable processes, relations, and in-
teractions, the tearing of which ultimately results in a crash of the
ecological system” (46).
Further, Moore (2017) and Padovan (2014) talk about social-eco-
logical metabolism using the language of “assemblages”, in a manner
not unlike that of Bennett and Duff above. Padovan notes that “the
process of exchange between society and nature has turned towards a
variable process of interpenetration and intermingling between society
and nature to build up new social hybrids or assemblages” (2014, 15).
The use here of the language of “interpenetration” and “intermingling”
to discuss the new combinations assembled in industrial capitalist
context is noteworthy.
I find this language tantalizing in thinking about drugs. I hear
echoes here of the language and practice of chemistry, which is in no
small part dedicated to separating nature into ever more specialized
components and reassembling them into new and sometimes calami-
tous combinations. Indeed, it seems that modern chemistry, not unlike
the alchemy that preceded it, could be described as a complex and
sophisticated set of recipes and techniques that direct us to mix and
mingle things such that they may recombine, or “interpenetrate”, in
new and useful (to humans) ways. Chemistry is in this light, perhaps,
the modern art of molecular assemblage.
If we think of drugs as industrial assemblages, then, with Bennett
(2010), the human bodies that consume them are also rightly con-
sidered assemblages, assemblages of atoms and molecules, many of
which are industrial in origin. This is an important ontopolitical in-
tervention: The people who consume drugs, and who produce and
distribute them, are not all that different from the drugs themselves.
Drugs and humans alike are complex socio-ecological composites, in-
fluencing and influenced by one another, exchanging with and relating
to one another in industrial capitalist metabolic fashion. With
Andrews and Duff (2019), drugs and humans are thus positioned as
“open” to one another, rather than existing as separate things with
separate lives. Indeed, to consume a drug is to interact with nature in a
specific way, and the result is a human-drug hybrid of the sort that
Padovan (2014) discusses above. Drugs, then, have the power to re-
assemble the people who use them, just as people reassemble molecules
derived from plants, animals, rocks, water, air and other things in la-
boratories and factories around the world.
In the section below, I consider these ideas in the context of an
important class of social-ecological drug hybrids: opioids. The discus-
sion considers the agency and power of things, and further deploys the
three theoretical elements derived from radical political economy about
humanity and nature discussed above: social-ecological metabolism and
metabolic rift as multidimensional and trans-scalar, chemicals as sig-
nifiers of rift, and chemistry as a scientific practice of rift and assem-
blage.
Metabolism, rift, and industrial opioid assemblages
Close analysis of opioid drugs has left me in awe of the accumulated
bodies of industrial knowledge and practice that we subsume under the
name “chemistry”. From roughly the time that the first alkaloid was
isolated by early chemists of the Industrial Revolution—it was mor-
phine, derived from raw opium in 18063—chemistry has gradually and
steadily come to know and order, and thus control, broad swaths of the
natural world. Findlay quotes the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler4 in
3
This date is from Blakemore and White 2002, though the exact date appears
disputed.
4
Wohler was the first to synthesize many important chemical compounds,
including urea. He also discovered the chemical element titanium.
S. Breger Bush
1835 on this point: “Organic chemistry just now is enough to drive one
mad. It gives me the impression of a primeval tropical forest, full of the
most remarkable things, a monstrous and boundless thicket, with no
way of escape, into which one may well dread to enter” (1965, 23).
Findlay comments in this context, “These words…show how great was
felt to be the need for bringing order into the chaotic mass of organic
compounds” (Findlay 1965, 23).
Chemists identify and categorize and catalogue nature, isolate its
component parts and put them to specialized use, disassemble the
natural world and then reassemble it in new ways. They combine, and
stir, and heat things up, and then combine some more and stir some
more. Over seemingly infinite iterations, the results of these efforts are
recorded and organized for future use. These knowledges and practices
are ever-accumulating, as are the readily commercialized outputs that
result from this systematic tinkering. Levere, 2001, in a monograph
about the history of chemistry revealingly entitled Transforming Matter,
notes, “There are just over a hundred kinds of chemical atoms, corre-
sponding to the different kinds of chemical elements, but their possible
and actual combinations are so many as to seem infinite. In only the
past thirty years, the list of known compounds has grown by seven and
a half million, which represents a tenfold increase in that short interval
of time” (2001, ix).
It is typical in health and medical conversations to categorize some
opioids as “semi-synthetic”, while others are deemed wholly “syn-
thetic”. This ontological sleight of hand works to separate “nature”
from “humanity” in a way that forecloses the possibility of research
that, as Padovan puts it, “helps to explain the evolution of the social as
deeply dependent on the natural” (2014, 15). From the perspective of
social-ecological metabolism, it makes no sense to think about “syn-
thetic” or “artificial” molecular compounds as somehow different from
“natural” or “semi-synthetic” ones, for all of these compounds are
natural in the simple sense that they are derived from some natural
things (plants, rocks, animals, etc.) by way of the effort/labor of other
natural things (people). To put people ontologically back into nature
(and nature back into people) requires one to dispose of such catego-
rical traps, and to look more carefully at material processes at work in
the production and consumption of opioid drugs. Put differently, the
question is not about which drug products are more or less “natural”,
but about what kinds of relationships people want and need to have
with nature and what kinds of relationships other natural things want
and need to have with people.
Drugs, rift and ecological Taylorism: Theory
Fentanyl, a now-common opioid drug many times more powerful
than heroin, is often deemed to be a “wholly synthetic” chemical
compound by which it is typically meant that fentanyl contains no
derivatives of the poppy plant whatsoever, even though it mimics the
analgesic and anesthetic properties of other opioid drugs that do derive
from the poppy.5 Pharmacognosy, that field of study dedicated to un-
derstanding medicinal drugs derived from nature, refers to opium—the
dried latex (sap) harvested from the seed capsules of the poppy
plant—as a “crude drug”, in contradistinction to drugs that have been
modified by human beings beyond simple collection and drying
(Funayama and Cordell, 2014).
To provide some contrast, heroin is typically considered “semi-
synthetic” owing to its basis in the poppy plant combined with the
several stages of processing with other chemicals involved in making it
(derived from morphine which is derived from opium which is derived
from the poppy). Fentanyl, considered wholly “synthetic”, is synthe-
sized from a precursor chemical called 4-anilino-N-phenethyl-
5
An “opioid” drug is one that bonds to opioid receptors in the body. An
“opiate” drug is one that is derived from opium, even if only distantly. Fentanyl
is thus an opioid, but not an opiate.
5
International Journal of Drug Policy 82 (2020) 102794
piperidine (4ANPP), which is itself a derivative of piperidine, which can
be derived from piperine (an alkaloid commonly found in pepper
plants, like those that produce peppercorns) but is most commonly
derived from pyridine (a coal tar derivative, but more commonly syn-
thesized from other chemicals). Thinking about how one can start with
the poppy plant and end up with heroin, or how one can start with
black pepper or coal tar and end up with fentanyl, has pushed me to
think about a process of social-ecological metabolism that I call “eco-
logical Taylorism” and its relationship to “rift” and “assemblage” in the
drug context. Indeed, ecological Taylorism is not only a material, in-
dustrial process at work in the drug context and beyond, but also in-
dustrial capitalism's ontology performing and reproducing itself in the
world.
In his Taylor, 1911 essay, Frederick Winslow Taylor set out a series
of principles and general practices for use by manufacturers in the in-
terests of maximizing the productivity of their employees. He writes,
“…the most important object of both the workmen and the manage-
ment should be the training and development of each individual in the
establishment, so that he can do (at his fastest pace and with the
maximum of efficiency) the highest class of work for which his natural
abilities fit him.” Taylor's ideas about “scientific management” of the
labor force, and of production in general, gave rise to more intense
managerial oversight of production, and increasingly specialized divi-
sions of industrial labor, with emphasis on deskilling industrial workers
and assigning them more rote and routine tasks, making laborers more
easily substitutable for one another and (arguably) more efficient in
their narrowly defined jobs. Lenin describes Taylorism in his ironically-
titled “A ‘Scientific’ System of Sweating” as follows:
What is this “scientific system”? Its purpose is to squeeze out of the
worker three times more labour during a working day of the same
length as before. The sturdiest and most skillful worker is put to
work; a special clock registers—in seconds and fractions of a sec-
ond—the amount of time spent on each operation and each motion;
the most economical and most efficient working methods are de-
veloped; the work of the best worker is recorded on cinemato-
graphic film, etc.
The result is that, within the same nine or ten working hours as
before, they squeeze out of the worker three times more labour,
mercilessly drain him of all his strength, and are three times faster in
sucking out every drop of the wage slave's nervous and physical
energy. And if he dies young? Well, there are many others waiting at
the gate! (Lenin 1913).
I suggest here for discussion and exploration that even a cursory
look into the production of fentanyl and other opioids yields the distinct
impression that the field of chemistry and the chemists who populate it
understand and engage with plants and animals and rocks and air and
water in much the same way that Taylor proposed understanding and
engaging with industrial workers. Just as the capitalist does with the
laborer, so too does the advance of chemistry, alongside industry, push
plants and animals into increasingly narrow and specialized roles. Just
as the capitalist does with the laborer, so too does the chemist try to
home in upon the “highest class of work for which [a plant's] natural
abilities fit [it]”, identifying and isolating and separating those bits and
pieces and components of plants (or animals or rocks, etc.) that are best
suited to a given task.
I intend for “ecological Taylorism” to suggest those perspectives,
methods and practices often applied in the production of drugs in the
industrial era, among other possible applications of this concept.
Specifically, in the context of fentanyl and other opioids like heroin, it
seems that ecological Taylorism has at least three overlapping dimen-
sions, each of which to some extent parallels the more common un-
derstanding of this term as applied in the context of factory labor. My
major argument here is that continuous application of these practices
and methods in our relationship with non-human nature is a form of
S. Breger Bush
ecological rift, one that results in new and powerful nature-human re-
lationships, relationships that take concrete form as “drugs”. Second, I
am also going to push the boundaries a bit here as I tentatively argue
that these metabolic rifts in opioid production are echoed, paralleled
and reproduced in the bodies of opioid consumers, as tantalizingly
suggested by the metabolic rift literature. The bodies and minds of drug
consumers are themselves industrial assemblages, forged from bits and
pieces of nature-human interaction based on industrial precepts and
processes (e.g. made of fluoridated water from our faucets, commodi-
fied entertainment packages from our Rokus, packaged and preserved
food from our grocery stores, polluted air from our neighborhoods, and
from the reassembled bits of poppy and other natural things formed at
this moment into oxycodone or Tramadol or methadone or what have
you).
Empirically speaking, I demonstrate below that ecological
Taylorism in the opioid context has at least three sets of features that
appear significant from the new ontological vantage point sketched out
above. First, ecological Taylorism means that plants, animals, rocks and
other natural things are categorized and separated and specialized.
Second, ecological Taylorism in the context of drug production implies
concerted efforts to maximize efficiency. But, efficiency in the drug
context is not only associated with cost reduction, but also with ma-
nipulation of plants and their components to maximize the desired ef-
fect of the plant in relation to human needs and wants, while mini-
mizing side effects. In the drug context, efficiency also seems to connote
precision (and, sometimes also potency). Third, ecological Taylorism
speaks to quantitative increase in the number of practices and methods
applied in drug production, the variety and quantity of ingredients used
in processing, the number of tools and extent of apparatus employed,
and the volume of recipes and formulas available for use and re-
deployment, among other matters of degree/quantity. That ecological
Taylorism has epistemological significance is clear given that knowl-
edge production in chemistry (and other sciences too, like biology and
botany) informs virtually all of these features and characteristics of the
production process. I further complement the discussion of industry and
chemistry in opioid production with data on opioid consumption from
medicine, public health, history and anthropology, among other fields,
to begin exploring the trans-scalar and multidimentional dynamics of
metabolic rift in this context.
Drugs, rift and ecological Taylorism: Practice
As the modern era unfolded, the opium poppy came to be under-
stood by humans to be mainly useful as a drug crop, eclipsing the more
multidimensional significance accorded to the poppy by humans in the
previous several millennia of human history. The opium poppy—-
classified in scientific nomenclature by genus and species during the
early Industrial Revolution as papaver somniferum6—was for most of
human history variously used by wide swaths of human society for
food, drug, financial, artistic and spiritual purposes (Hobbs 1998,
Jacomet 2008, Salavert 2011, Guerra-Doce 2014, Abdullaev 2010). For
example, across the ancient Egyptian spiritual realm, opium was closely
related to religious cults, particularly that of Thoth, the god of wisdom
(Hobbs 1998). In some parts of the world, where the poppy's primary
social function was as a food (oilseed) crop, drug production took a
secondary role, if drugs were made at all (the dried plant pieces leftover
after the seed harvest—called poppy chaff or straw—can be used to
make opioid drugs). In Hungary, for example, commercial morphine
6
Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) is often credited with
laying the foundations for the taxonomic system that we still use today to
classify plant varieties. That said, the novelty of Linnaeus’ contributions are not
universally accepted, with some scholars arguing that he did little new beyond
the taxonomies developed by Aristotle some two thousand years prior (e.g.
Hull 1965).
6
International Journal of Drug Policy 82 (2020) 102794
production from poppy straw began in earnest only in the 1920s
(UNODC 1953), while poppy cultivation for food had been ongoing for
centuries prior.
Of course, medical use of the poppy and the sap from the seed
capsule that we call opium, historically complimented these other uses.
The Ebers Papyrus (ca. 1450 B.C.E.) prescribes this remedy for infant
colic: "[C]apsules of poppy, [and] fly's dirt that is on the wall, are
mixed, strained and taken for four days. [The infant] ceases im-
mediately to cry" (Merlin 1984, 274 in Hobbs 1998, 67). Indeed, it is an
indication of the Tayloristic bent of modern industrial capitalist drug
production processes that over the course of the modern industrial
period the uses to which the poppy is put have narrowed significantly. I
am reminded of radical political economic indictments of work under
industrial capitalism as “stupefying” owing to its monotony and spe-
cificity (e.g. Marcuse 1964) and cannot help but wonder if the poppy
feels the same as the proletarian (how off base is it, then, to consider so-
called drug “epidemics”, like the opioid epidemic, as a kind of prole-
tarian revolt, as these natural things pressing humanity for more
freedom and opportunity and better treatment?).
Indeed, if we permit a bit of ontological slippage here, so that we
can see echoes and reflections of rift across scales and categories and
dimensions, it becomes clear that this historical social-ecological spe-
cialization in the poppy's use-value to humans was reproduced in other
ways at other scales and in other places and spaces. Opium itself was
historically prescribed medicinally for a very wide swath of ailments, as
indicated in Table 1 below. Over the past roughly two hundred years,
beginning with the derivation of morphine in 1806, the opium poppy
has been systematically deconstructed and disassembled, with each of
its component parts isolated, named, categorized and specialized for
use, each used for an ever-narrower range of ailments, with these poppy
components often mixed and combined and reassembled with parts and
components of other natural things from other places mediated by
people from other places.
Alongside opium's multidimensional medicinal properties, Table 1
also presents the much more specialized uses to which more modern,
industrial poppy assemblages are put (all of the modern opioids are not
represented here, just a sampling to illustrate this point7). Of course, it
almost goes without saying that this process of specialization is highly
profitable for drug producers and middlemen of all kinds. Rather than
trying to sell one undifferentiated product in a highly competitive
global marketplace, producers and middlemen could, over time, sell a
large number of specialized products in less competitive and more
differentiated marketplaces. This was as true for Bayer Pharmaceuticals
in the late 19th century (which invented heroin) as it is today for Purdue
Pharma (which invented Oxycontin).
It is important to note how many industrial opioid assemblages have
been developed to treat pain in various ways, differentiated by type of
pain (moderate or severe) and also by the time period over which the
drug is effective (long-term or short-term pain relief). Also interesting is
the fact that the application of industrial techniques to the morphine
molecule can produce opioid agonists (like heroin) alongside opioid
antagonists (like naloxone). On the one hand, industrial techniques
have thus deconstructed and reassembled the poppy into a large
number of opioid drugs over the past roughly two hundred years that
are more precisely targeted towards specific human needs and wants.
But, on the other hand, these products are more specialized and less
capable of meeting the broad swath of human needs and wants that
used to be met with the crude drug we call opium. Here we thus see
again that a multidimensional historical relationship with the poppy as
medicine becomes more one-dimensional, to borrow Marcuse's
7
There are several dozen patents for opioid drugs sine 1974 in the US alone
(US Patent Office), and some 1400 analogues of fentanyl have been developed
worldwide in the past few decades, just to give a sense of how many opioid
drugs are in existence today.
S. Breger Bush International Journal of Drug Policy 82 (2020) 102794

Table 1
Human Uses for Opium Compared to Other Opioid Drugs.
Opium Historical human medical usesa Other opioids Uses in humans presentlyb

Morphine Severe pain

Diarrhea Codeine Mild to moderate pain, and for cough in conjunction with other medications
Cough Papaverine To improve circulation of blood flow
Cold Heroin Pain, myocardial infarctiond
Infant colic Methadone Long-term pain management and MAT therapiesc
Infant crying Oxocodone Moderate to severe pain
Fatigue Hydrocodone Long-term treatment of severe pain
Depression Buprenorphine MAT therapies
Anxiety Naloxone To reverse respiratory depression caused by opioid overdose
Insomnia Tramadol Moderate to moderately severe pain
Muscle pain Meperidine Moderate to severe pain
Rheumatism Fentanyl Severe pain, especially advanced cancer pain
Sore/dry eye
Cholera
Dysentery
Earache
Toothache
Stomach cramps
Flatulence
Headaches
Insanity
Hysteria
Menopause
Hemorrhoids
Ulcers
Bruises
Sprains
Chilblains

a
This list could not possibly be comprehensive, given that opium has been widely used by most human communities over the course of the last several thousand
years. From (Berridge and Edwards 1980; Merlin 1984).
b
From MedlinePlus database, US National Library of Medicine, and the National Institutes of Health. These lists exclude use for pleasure or uses for self-
medication. All of these drugs, with the exception of papaverine, are often used for pleasure or self-medication according to anecdotal evidence, though systematic
data collection is nonexistent.
c
MAT means medically assisted treatment and is the common term to describe the process by which less harmful opioids are substituted for more harmful ones in
order to help users manage the withdrawal symptoms associated with recovery from opioid addiction.
d
These uses are not permitted in the US but are in other countries.

terminology (1964), as the poppy is subjected to Tayloristic techniques
and single-minded, alienated industrial poppy assemblages emerge.
The industrialization of poppy-human relationships that is hinted at
in this table (more below) was necessarily complimented at the global
scale by industrial-imperial reorganizations of labor, trade, and agri-
cultural production. As Trocki (1999), Davis (2000), and Derks (2012)
indicate, the first recorded instances of mass opioid addiction on the
global historical record coincided, not coincidentally, with the in-
troduction of early industrial agricultural techniques in the production
of poppy and other crops, that is, mass production on monocropped
plantations, along with explosive growth in world trade (Do poppies
miss the wild, jungle-like thickets that Wöhler describes?). As their
histories further suggest, the millions of opium consumers who lived
over the course of the several centuries between the 17th and 19th
centuries are themselves perhaps usefully understood as complex socio-
ecological composites, tapestries of dried poppy latex and flesh, of
plantations and slavery, of gold and pepper and tea, of empire and
exploitation and oppression (opioid consumers hailed from many
countries and regions, including India, Indonesia, China, Egypt, Britain,
France, the Netherlands and the US). The opium consumer is social-
ecological metabolism in process, inhaling and exhaling and trans-
forming nature and humanity even as they are themselves transformed.
For example, it is revealing indeed that Derks credits Dutch and Chinese
traders with introducing the technique of smoking opium to populations in
East Asia, indicating concretely a junction at which system-level social and
ecological rift (empire) is reproduced materially as a rift at the individual
and molecular levels, as the flame transforms the raw opium and inhaled
opium smoke alters the brain chemistry of the user: “Opium smoking in
China arose from the contact of Chinese traders with the Dutch in Java, who
had the habit of mixing a little opium with their tobacco” (Derks 2012, 20).
Such “ontological intersections” abound. As another example, it was a
common-enough colonial practice to dispense opium to slaves and other
agricultural laborers on plantations as a palliative to relieve pain and stress
in tired bodies and minds, and to ensure obedience to plantation owners and
imperial administrations (e.g. Hu-Dehart 2005). Such practices were mir-
rored in urban, imperial centers as opium was dispensed broadly to working
class people who used this poppy sap to dull the mental and physical pain of
factory labor (Berridge and Edwards 1980). As opium was thus used by
people to enslave one another, humanity as a whole became enslaved by the
poppy. And, here in this second half of this rifted dialectic, the poppy's
power over humans appears rather indiscriminate, generating material de-
pendencies of all kinds among human participants in the poppy economy,
including among consumers (some of whom became habituated to the
drug's physiological effects), and producers, merchants, and imperial ad-
ministrations (who became habituated to the financial flows the poppy
generated), to the point that humans warred with one another during the
Opium Wars, with each faction trying to coopt the poppy's powers for
themselves (Derks 2012, Trocki 1999, Davis 2000).
Over the course of the 19th century, as the opium poppy wreaked
havoc on humanity, humanity continued to wreak havoc on the poppy in
increasingly innovative and “scientific” ways. With morphine and codeine
alkaloids isolated in the early 19th century, a variety of over-the-counter
opioid drug products were developed and sold widely across Europe and
North America, including cough syrups, pain relievers, and infant re-
medies. In 1874, heroin was synthesized from morphine by Bayer. By the
1930s, a wide variety of new opioid drugs were in development for
commercial production, distribution and use. Methadone, one of the first
wholly “synthetic” opioids (meaning that it is not made from the poppy,

7
S. Breger Bush
but rather is assembled from other chemical agents), was developed
around this time, paving the way for its more infamous cousin, fentanyl,
first developed and patented in 1964. Roughly around this time, the me-
tabolic rifts entailed in such Tayloristic advances in chemistry would be
echoed again at the system level in the 1960s-1970s with the rise of mass
heroin consumption in the US and Europe, and by American soldiers
abroad fighting in the Vietnam War. The dawn of mass global heroin
consumption was followed closely by the US War on Drugs that began in
1971, and since the early 2000s, the opioid crisis in the US that has
claimed over 700,000 lives (CDC 2019).
As time passed and scientific knowledge and practice accumulated, the
production processes for opioid drugs became longer (more steps or stages
in production), drew on more extensive and complex bodies of scientific
knowledge, required use of different equipment and techniques, and re-
quired more ingredients, and lots more mixing and separating. These more
complex production processes tended to yield stronger and/or more pre-
cise drug assemblages, meaning that the strongest and most narrowly
targeted opioids are often the result of the longest and most complex
processes, while less potent or less specific drugs tended to be the result of
shorter and less complex production processes. Here, industrialization
equates roughly not only to potency and precision, but also to toxicity.
While not perfectly correlated, drug potency and toxicity rise in tandem.
Put differently, industrial social-ecological relations in opioid production
empower and endanger and alienate poppies and humans alike.
Morphine production. After raw opium is collected and dried, typi-
cally from middle-aged poppies who have not yet reached their re-
productive stage, the opium is put into boiling water and cooked for a
while in a pot. It is mixed with calcium hydroxide (slaked lime), which
causes the morphine molecule to form a solution with the lime. This
solution is filtered to remove any bits of plant matter or other im-
purities. Then, it is mixed with ammonium chloride and reheated. The
morphine separates from the rest of the mix, and the solid white chunks
of morphine base (morphine class 1) accumulates on the bottom of the
pot. The base is then filtered out from the rest of the mix using a cloth.
Figure 1 below shows the chemical structure for morphine, represented
by chemists as C17H19NO3. If harvesting poppy sap by slicing open the
seed pod is viewed in relational terms, then by way of this process
humans are agents of rift, of the reduction of the poppy in all of its
multidimensional splendor to a mere drug crop (when you lance the
seed pod, the seeds do not mature, and the poppy's reproductive cycle is
interrupted). With the conversion of opium to morphine, humans affect
Figure 1. Chemical structure of the thing called morphine. Source: PubChem.
8
International Journal of Drug Policy 82 (2020) 102794
rift at the molecular level, rupturing molecular bonds in order to derive
a first-order industrial poppy assemblage (EMCDDA 2016, PBS 2002).
Heroin production. Morphine can be easily converted to heroin with the
same simple tools—a pot, a burner, and a filter/cloth—and a few more
ingredients. Heroin, also known as diamorphine, is assembled from mor-
phine base, which is mixed with acetic anhydride and cooked at 85°C for
two hours. The morphine dissolves during this process, and after two
hours, the mixture is left to cool, over which time the acid bonds with the
morphine to form a new assemblage: heroin. Water is added to the mix,
which dissolves the heroin, and then sodium carbonate is added. The re-
sult is called “heroin base”. Heroin base is converted to “smoking heroin”
by adding hydrochloric acid. Purer heroin is made by adding ether along
with the hydrochloric acid. These various pasty compounds are dried
before packaging and sale. Relative to morphine production, poppy mo-
lecules are ruptured even further as they are heated and mixed with other
ingredients over the course of three more discrete production stages that
involve several other industrial chemicals. Figure 2 below shows the
chemical structure of heroin, represented by chemists as C21H23NO5. Four
extra carbon atoms, four extra hydrogen atoms, and two extra oxygen
atoms in this opioid assemblage result in a drug that is twice the potency
of morphine (EMCDDA 2016, PBS 2002).
Fentanyl production. While fentanyl is classified as an opioid drug be-
cause it bonds to human opioid receptors, it is not actually made from the
poppy. By the time Janssen developed his process for creating fentanyl in
1964, chemistry had advanced significantly, such that chemists could by
this time create in a laboratory from wild lists of ingredients using more
advanced tools and techniques compounds that mimicked the effects of
opiate drugs. Importantly, Janssen's recipe begins with a series of in-
dustrial chemicals: N-(4-piperidyl)-propionanilide, sodium carbonate, po-
tassium iodide, hexone, Ɓ-phenylethyl chloride, and 4-methyl-2-penta-
none. This mixture is to be stirred and “refluxed” for 27 hours (USPO
#3,141,823, 1962). Reflux is a process typically employed in industrial
chemical plants and other high-tech chemical operations and is part of a
process by which materials in a solution are separated from one another by
leveraging the different boiling/evaporation points for different com-
pounds in the solution. It involves use of rather sophisticated equipment,
at least relative to the cases of morphine and heroin production discussed
above (most of this machine assembly is created by humans with the help
of ore-bearing rocks, powerful agents in their own right). At the time
Janssen was developing fentanyl, reflux would have likely been achieved
using some kind of fractionation device. Figure 3 below shows a schematic
Figure 2. Chemical structure of the thing called heroin. Source: PubChem.
S. Breger Bush
Figure 3. Machine for dehydration and fractionation of crude pyridine (1955). Source: USPO #2,717,232 (1955).
for a fractionation device patented in 1955, not long before Janssen's
patent. This device is for fractionation required in the production of crude
pyridine, an issue to which I will return shortly.
As this illustration clearly demonstrates, making fentanyl by the
Janssen method is not easily attempted by amateur chemists using
common tools. By the early 1980s, a simpler method for the production
of fentanyl was developed—the Siegfried method—which involves
fewer steps and fewer ingredients (this relatively easier path to fentanyl
synthesis has opened the door to illegal production in clandestine la-
boratories). According to the anonymously-posted instructions that I
hunted down on the web8, the recipe begins with an intermediate
compound called 4ANPP (N-Phenethyl-4-piperidinone), which is mixed
with pure pyridine and propionyl chloride under tightly controlled
temperatures (30o-60°C). The solution is extracted using di-
chloromethane, the solvent is evaporated under vacuum, and then
washed with acetone. The result is fentanyl hydrochloride, an opioid
assemblage ready for use. Pyridine, required for this process, was his-
torically derived from pepper plants (especially those that produce
black and white peppercorns) or animal bones. In 1955, when the
fractionation machine above was devised, it was most likely derived
from coal tar. It can also be synthesized from acetaldehyde, ammonia,
and formaldehyde, with a zeolite catalyst (Pyridine FAQ 2005).
Relative to morphine and heroin, fentanyl production is a ca-
cophony of metabolic rift, as industrial processes rupture and tear and
separate, and reform and reassemble, in a dizzying stream of chemical
processes and ingredients. Fentanyl is represented by chemists as
C22H28N2O. Relative to heroin, one less carbon atom, five fewer hy-
drogen atoms, one more nitrogen atom, and four fewer oxygen atoms
yields an opioid assemblage that is 50 times more potent. Figure 4
below illustrates the chemical structure of fentanyl.
The most potent and toxic opioid drugs, like fentanyl, are thus super-
complex industrial assemblages that bring together an increasingly diverse
set of highly processed ingredients into relation with one another by way of
increasingly advanced technologies and centuries-old accumulations of
8
For obvious reasons, this recipe is hard to find and verify.
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International Journal of Drug Policy 82 (2020) 102794
scientific knowledge. In many other spheres of human economic activity, it
has become commonplace to assert that the manner in which humans in-
teract with nature to produce goods and services has direct consequences for
how human consumers interact with and are affected by the products that
are created. It is just as common to point to the unintended social-ecological
consequences of those production systems for human society and the
broader ecosystem (i.e. negative externalities). As discussed above, this
understanding of production and consumption, of means and ends, as being
intricately connected issues directly from the conceptualization of econo-
mies as ecological entities and has been borne out empirically in many
contexts. Several decades of food systems research, for example, has drawn
clear and well-evidenced connections between industrial food production
processes on the one hand and indicators of consumer well-being on the
other, such as obesity, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and a variety of
diet-related cancers, not to mention food poisoning and other food safety
concerns (e.g. Pollan 2006, Schlosser 2001, Patel 2008, Lytton 2019). Food
systems researchers have also meticulously documented the social and en-
vironmental consequences of industrial food production practices that spill
over into communities and the ecosystem as negative externalities, from
water and soil pollution to climate change (e.g. Kirby 2010,
Silbergeld 2016). Similar connections between production processes and
consumption outcomes have been made in the context of plastics (e.g.
Yang et. al. 2011, al-Qutob et. al. 2014) and cell phones (e.g.
Manivannan 2016, Auvinen 2002), among other industrial commodities.
It seems that it may be fruitful, then, to similarly frame opioid drug
matters, i.e. to try to situate opioid use within an ontological frame in
which material human nature-relationships in the industrial era rift,
shift and reproduce across scales and dimensions.9 What appears below
is what I have been able to piece together from a variety of different
kinds of sources.
Human opioid consumption. Existing and historical pharmacological
9
Challenges to individualized understandings of addiction have proliferated
in recent years, e.g. Alexander 2008, Reith 2018. The discussion here departs
from the work of these scholars in that I think about use generally, and not only
addiction, and also because I think about human-nature relationships and not
only relationships among people.
S. Breger Bush
Figure 4. Chemical structure of the thing called fentanyl. Source: PubChem
research on human opioid consumption reveals the precise pathways
and mechanisms by which opioid drugs affect human bodies and minds.
Cutting edge modern scholarship on opioid use, research that considers
human bodies not as discrete entities but as ecosystems in their own
right, further suggest social-ecological pathways and mechanisms in-
volving the human microbiome. When framed in relation to the meta-
bolic rifts engendered by industrial capitalism, this research suggests
that quality of the relationships forged between humans and opioids
inside human bodies, and between opioids and other creatures like
bacteria that live inside people, are very much conditioned upon the
processes by which a given opioid is produced and the ingredients used
in that particular assemblage. In other words, opioids do not all exert
the same influence on the human mind, body and microbiome, just as
not all corn products influence the human body in the same way.
The human body, like the bodies of many other creatures10, is built
to react to opioids and itself produces two morphine-like drugs in-
ternally, enkaphalins and endorphins. Endogenous opioids are “opioid
neuropeptides which are naturally produced in the body that serve a
primary function as an agent blocking the perception of pain and, ad-
ditionally, present in cases of pleasure” (Chaudhry and Kum 2019).
Corbett et. al. note, “By the early 1970s the idea had arisen that the
function of the opioid receptors in the brain was not to mediate the
pharmacological effects of opium alkaloids and their congeners, but
that there must exist endogenous agonists fulfilling a physiological
function” (Corbett et. al. 2006). Foregrounding mass human con-
sumption of industrial opioids in the modern era is thus the simple fact
that our bodies are built to like such chemical assemblages, not unlike
the ways in which we are physiologically wired to seek out salt, sugar
and fat (Moss 2013).
When opioid drugs enter our bodies—be it by ingestion, inhalation,
injection or other method of consumption—they quite literally affix
themselves to our opioid receptors. At this critical juncture, the human
body materially connects with molecular bits and pieces of poppy and
other materials—creating a new industrial human-poppy assemblage.
When highly selective and specialized opioid drugs are consumed, drug
molecules bond to specific receptors generating more specific reactions.
As the US National Library of Medicine notes in relation to codeine,
10
Rats, mice, parrots, and monkeys, among others, have demonstrated a
fondness for these drugs. All vertebrate animals have opioid receptors
(Stevens 2009).
10
International Journal of Drug Policy 82 (2020) 102794
“When codeine is used to treat pain, it works by changing the way the
brain and nervous system respond to pain” (USNLM 2019). These
changes are not wholly of human origin, rather, they are the products of
a very specific relationship between different parts of nature. Here, the
poppy and its descendants are revealed as political-economic agents in
their own right, exerting their power over humans by bonding to opioid
receptors in the human nervous system.
Stevens further discusses the development of highly specialized
opioid drugs, “The development of highly-selective opioid antagonists
by Takemori and Portoghese ushered in a new era of opioid pharma-
cology. These selective opioid antagonists show 100- to 1000-fold or
greater selectivity for their respective type of opioid receptor” (2009).
Choi and Billings (2002) provide detail, in Table 2 below, on how
opioid drugs that target different opioid receptors relate to human
bodies and minds in distinct ways. For example, drugs that target the
Mu1 receptor offer pain relief and euphoria, have low addiction risk,
and can induce hypothermia and urinary retention, among other side
effects. By contrast, drugs that target the Mu2 receptor carry a higher
addiction risk and also a risk of respiratory depression. In other words,
different types of opioid assemblages exert different powers over hu-
mans.
Pasternak and Pan, 2011 detail how different industrial poppy as-
semblages can produce markedly different effects in human bodies and
minds: “Some patients may encounter severe side effects such as nausea
and vomiting with one agent, while having no difficulties at all with the
other. For example, it is not uncommon to find patients with severe
nausea/vomiting from morphine tolerating methadone without pro-
blems. In addition, the analgesic activity of the opioids also can vary
among patients. One patient may find one mu opioid to be quite ef-
fective while a different drug may not work anywhere near as well
(2011).” As also indicated by Choi and Billings above, different kinds of
opioid drugs provide different kinds of openings for addiction, overdose
and death. “Being highly lipophilic, [fentanyl] is 50–125 times more
potent than morphine and it has a faster onset of action… Un-
fortunately, the excellent analgesics and research compounds of the
fentanyl family have their darker side, too. The substances bear a high
potential for abuse and addiction, and because of narrow difference
between the active (be it for medical or abuse purposes) dose and the
lethal one, they can easily deprive an abuser of life” (Lipinski et al.
2019).
It is important to note here that opium consumption in the 19th and
early 20th centuries did not affect human bodies and minds in the same
ways as the highly processed opioid drugs consumers have access to
today. Berridge and Edwards, 1980 note that while “dependence or
addiction among working people was likely to be common” in 19th
century Britain, there is “less evidence of a steep overall increase in
either mortality or consumption in the first half of the century” (1980,
34). They further relate the findings of doctors in the first half of the
19th century that opium users did not seem to develop a tolerance for
the drug: “the same doses have been used for years without any var-
iation” (1980, 36). Dikotter et al., 2007 further note in the context of
dispelling myths about 19th century opium use, “Opium smokers, in
short, could moderate their use for personal and social reasons and even
cease taking it altogether without help” (2007, 21).
That opium does not cause consumers to develop a tolerance is
significant and makes opium different than many of the more heavily
processed opioid products manufactured via industrial methods
(Dumas and Pollack 2008). The development of a tolerance to drugs
like morphine and heroin is itself the result of a relationship between
human bodies and these industrial hybrids:
Tolerance to drugs can be produced by several different mechan-
isms, but in the case of morphine or heroin, tolerance develops at
the level of the cellular targets. For example, when morphine binds
to opioid receptors, it triggers the inhibition of an enzyme (adeny-
late cyclase) that orchestrates several chemicals in the cell to
S. Breger Bush International Journal of Drug Policy 82 (2020) 102794

maintain the firing of impulses. After repeated activation of the

opioid receptor by morphine, the enzyme adapts so that the mor-

Naloxone Naltrexone β-FNA Naloxonazine (μ1)

phine can no longer cause changes in cell firing. Thus, the effect of a

Naloxone Naltrexone BNTX (δ1) Naltrindole

given dose of morphine or heroin is diminished (National Institute of
Drug Abuse 2019).
In the case of addiction, too, industrialized opioid agonists contrast

Naloxone Naltrexone Nor-BNI

starkly with the portrait of opium tolerance and addiction painted in
the counterhegemonic medical histories cited above. While certainly
exerting its power over people, this relatively unprocessed and unin-
dustrialized opioid did not “take hold” of human minds and bodies like
Naltriben (δ2)

some of its modern counterparts. Regarding heroin, “It's easy to become

Antagonist

addicted. Even after using it just one or two times, it can be hard to stop
yourself from using again” (Bhandari 2019). Regarding fentanyl, “Re-
peated use builds a tolerance to the drug, meaning higher dosage are
needed for users to achieve the desired effect. Fentanyl rewires the
DPDPE (δ1) DADLE1 Deltorphine (δ2) DSLET

reward center of the brain, causing the user to continue seeking the
Morphine Sufentanil Meperidine DAMGO

Butorphanol Bremazocine Spiradoline U-

drug and making it difficult to stop using” (Kaliszewski 2019).

Opioids and the microbiome. While opioids of different kinds exert
different powers and influences over humans, so too do they enjoy
power in relation to the human microbiome. The human body is itself
an ecosystem, a host for billions upon billions of microorganisms. Just
as opioids affect human bodies and minds, so too do they impact these
other creatures that live on and inside of us. New research on these
relationships and effects again underscores the importance of viewing
50,488 (κ1)

opioid production and consumption as complexes of industrial, social-

Agonist

ecological relationships in which rifts and ruptures between people and

(δ2)

other natural things are rife.

For example, researchers have found that opioid use accelerates the
progression of HIV in patients, indicating a “triangular trade” of sorts
Rabbit vas deferens
Mouse vas deferens
Guinea pig ileum

between people, bacteria and viruses mediated by opioid assemblages

Isolated Organ

(not unlike the triangular trade between India, China and Britain in the
19th century in which opium exports from India to China financed
Bioassay

British domestic imports of Chinese manufactures, see, e.g.

Davis 2000). “[O]pioids modulate GI immunity and disrupt gut
homeostasis, thereby driving pathological immune activation and dis-
Analgesia: supraspinal, spinal (δ2) Respiratory depression Significant addiction risk Constipation

Analgesia: supraspinal (κ3) spinal (κ1) peripheral Constipation Sedation Dysphoria Low addiction

ease progression following HIV infection… Gut commensal microbiota

is an essential compartment of the gut immune system playing a critical
Analgesia: supraspinal spinal peripherala Euphoria Low addiction potential Bradycardia

role in maintaining intestinal homeostasis” (Meng, Sindburg and Roy

2015).
Analgesia: spinal Respiratory depression Significant addiction risk Constipation

Akbarali and Dewey, 2017 indicate the involvement of the GI mi-

crobiome in the development of opioid tolerance, “Recent work has
suggested a significant role of the gastrointestinal microbiome in be-
havioral responses to opioids, including the development of tolerance
to its pain-relieving effects… peripheral mechanisms emanating from
the gut can profoundly affect central control of opioid function” (2017).
Cussotto et al., 2019 similarly note, “An expanding body of evidence
supports the notion that microbes can metabolise drugs and vice versa
drugs can modify the gut microbiota composition” (2019). They further
note that different opioid drugs have different effects on the micro-
biome, comparing the influence of morphine, tramadol, methadone. In
a study in mice, “both intermittent and sustained morphine adminis-
tration influenced the gut microbiome in a way that was causally related
Opioid drug selectivity and effects on humans.

Hypothermia Urinary retention

to behaviours associated with opioid dependence” (2019, emphasis

added).
In the empirical rendering of the drug economy above, drug con-
potential Diuresis (κ1)

sumption and some of the negative effects of drug use on humans in-
Source: Choi and Billings (2002)
Principal Actions

volve a series of interactions between people/mice, bacteria and the

(minimal risk)

poppy in incredibly complex configurations that seem to defy analysis

from the perspective of a single social-ecological scale or dimension. If
alienation from others and from nature can be viewed as a reason to
consume drugs (e.g. Alexander 2008), then it seems plausible to view
overdose death, for example, as an internalization of such rifts, as
Delta (δ1, δ2)

Kappa (κ1–4)

opioids bind to receptors in humans and interact with legions of bac-

Mu (μ2)
Mμ (μ1)
Table 2

teria in specific ways.

Name

11
S. Breger Bush
Conclusions
Rhodes et. al. note that thinking about ontopolitics “invites spec-
ulation on how intervening might be done differently” (2019). The
ontological adventure above—inspired by perspectives across multiple
disciplines and fields—is no exception. Perhaps most importantly, from
this vantage point drug production and consumption cease to be merely
human affairs and are revealed as complex relationships between hu-
mans and other natural things like plants, animals, rocks, water and air.
Not least, decentering humanity in this way permits drug “problems”,
like clandestine fentanyl production in underground labs in China and
waves of opioid overdose deaths across the US, to be reframed as
questions about our relationships to nature and to one another. In the
case of the opioids discussed above I frame this relationship as an in-
dustrial one defined in part by deployment of “ecological Taylorism”, or
that tendency to order nature, categorize it, dissect it, specialize its
parts into discrete functions, and try to make it more productive and
efficient relative to human needs and wants.
In other words, perhaps it would be useful moving forward to start
thinking about human drug issues squarely as industrial issues. Thinking
about alternative modes of interaction with other natural things that
can help to heal rifts in the social-ecological metabolism is thus crucial
in the drug context. It seems that the possibilities here are just en-
ormous in terms of future research and policy, especially given the
multidimensional and trans-scalar ontological perspective on drugs
outlined above. Indeed, to think about human drug issues as industrial
ones is to locate their causes and effects in many times and places and
spaces at once, permitting one to think about interventions and policy
in creative and unconventional ways. For example, what kinds of drug-
like substances are available for treating pain that interact more co-
operatively with the colonies of microorganisms that populate human
bodies? Could we treat drug addiction by forging more a more peaceful
political-economic relationship with the other creatures that live inside
us? How might we begin deindustrializing drug research and develop-
ment? Might it be fruitful to fund cross-cultural partnerships between
chemists and pharmacologists trained in industrial techniques and drug
innovators with backgrounds in alternative techniques and practices?
Could it be useful to merge our vast interdisciplinary knowledge of food
and industrialization with our rather paltry (by comparison) under-
standing of drugs and drug systems? I could go on.
I would like to specifically mention two additional possibilities that
I find especially fascinating. It has become commonplace among critical
food systems researchers, nutritionists and the medical profession to
recommend that people eat “whole” foods, that is, foods that are rela-
tively unprocessed and as close as possible to the form they took in the
fields and forests and ranches from whence they came. Study after study
of health outcomes indicates that eating processed foods—i.e. industrial
foods—are generally disadvantageous to the health of individuals, so-
ciety as a whole, and the environment. In the food context, it has be-
come common to link together different levels and dimensions of social-
ecological metabolism in thinking about health and wellness, i.e. the
same foods that seem best for our bodies and minds are also those that
seem to be best for our relationships with one another and for our re-
lationships with animals, plants, and the Earth. The foregoing analysis
suggests that it would be worth our while to put some serious time and
effort into researching and tracing the similar processes, relationships
and connections that seem to prevail in the drug context. In other
words, is fentanyl perhaps the Twinkie of drugs?
Moreover, if drugs are relationships with nature, and if our current
relationship with nature in the opioid drug context doesn't seem to be
working out so well, does it not make sense to consider renegotiating
our relationship with the poppy? Rather than a “war” on poppies and
their industrial offspring (be it with guns or medical treatments), does it
make sense to think about “peace” between human and poppies? What
would a more diplomatic and mutually supportive relationship with
poppies look like? In this context, it is important to emphasize
12
International Journal of Drug Policy 82 (2020) 102794
interdisciplinary research moving forward. It is unfortunate that the
social sciences and humanities tend to think mostly about the power of
people, with the power of other natural things and beings relegated to
the sciences. The foregoing analysis suggests that forging a détente with
the poppy and paving the way for future inter-thing and inter-species
collaboration, requires flexible and creative alliances among re-
searchers across academic lines. How can a political economist like me
consider the nuances of the relationship between poppies, people and
bacteria without support from microbiologists? How can chemists be
expected to think about molecular rift and its consequences without
support from political ecologists? Critical analyses of industrial capit-
alism and the profound impacts it has on the lives of all things on this
planet must be a joint endeavor of scholars and practitioners of all types
with many different kinds of knowledge and experience and training, as
must also be our efforts to forge creative solutions to seemingly in-
tractable problems moving forward.
Declaration of Competing Interest
I have no conflicts of interest to report.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Matthew Kriese for his research in support of this
essay, and to the anonymous reviewers who generously provided
comments.
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