ABSTRACT
William Burroughs verdict on 'junk international' is echoed in the policy-studies research of Paul B. Stares's Global Habit, where the drug trade again emerges as the descriptor par excellence of globalization's unstable tendencies. Stares's study is grounded in the familiar point that free-trade capitalism is inimical to the integrity of nation-states, and corrosive of regional identities and differences. This case-study of Britain in the 1950s gives historical substance to the observations of Burroughs, and the analysis in Habit, which conjure with drugs as a supremely relevant contemporary 'synecdoche'. As both writers recognize, drugs shadow and parody the cult of 'legitimate' commodity fetishism. Global Habit embraces Burroughs's idea that the drug trade is not the Other but the Brother of legitimate capital. The drug trade focalized fears that America's commercial dynamism, promoted through its powerful media, heralded a new order of cultural homogenization and new patterns of 'narcotizing' consumption.
