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Book Reviews
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Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade
by Chellis Glendinning
(New Society Publishers, 2004, 1-800-567-6772)
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It may not seem ecologically relevant, the fact that several of the nations where the U.S. Government has intervened — Vietnam, Columbia, Afghanistan, others — soon became leading exporters of illicit drugs, or that in step with this, 20,000 citizens using in the U.S. during the fifties mushroomed into millions of addicts.
To the outside world this linkage began to grow clear in Chimayo, New Mexico, when that town ranked first in overdoses in its county, the county first in overdoses in a state with that distinction. No accident, as author and psychologist Chellis Glendinning points out in her incisive and pungent prose, that in a city, county, and state renowned for poverty, those who use chiva (heroin) have been dislocated from their traditions, their methods of land use, and the indigenous ceremonies in which altered states served spiritual ecstasy. Chiva is a kind of colonial anti-religion, a psuedospiritual way to forget, quickly, the daily crush of hunger and racism; for to the dirt-poor addicts of Chimayo, drugs are for people destroyed by colonial reality.
Just say no? How do you say no when heroin is as accessible around the world as a McDonald’s hamburger? Or when the CIA funds the world’s wealthiest drug pushers?
Pushing has been a colonial enterprise since the British did it to the Chinese to control the Asian trade markets. Laundered drug money paid for much of the Industrial Revolution, just as bullion stolen from the New World paid for the Age of Exploration (read: Age of Exploitation). The forced substitution of intoxication for ecstasy is but one "bait and switch" in a list of them: TV for local pageantry, crime for theater, walkmans and cell phones for face-to-face conversation, legalities for local reconciliation. Punishment for redemption. Stucco for belonging to land.
The colonial era never ended.
But Chimayo fought back, and the struggle against the global drug trade took residents back to indigenous practices laughed at by the mainstream: herbal remedies, the restoration of ceremony, support from neighbors and extended families: all earth-based and ecological. Naturally: if dis-place-ment lie at the heart of the problem, then so must the cure. As a result, overdose and drug use rates have dropped, as has crime, and the town has reclaimed itself from pushers and from salesmen plugged into the network of illegally financed globalization. (The next time you turn on that radio or computer assembled overseas, listen in the hum for faceless withdraw shivers.)
A resident of Chimayo whose lover succumbed to chiva, Glendinning bears witness in this book to the close connection between ceremonial containment, community solidarity, local activism, and resistance to outside top-down "solutions" by tracing a town’s successful attempt to re-emplace itself in its ancestral soils and ways of being, thereby reversing the centuries-old addiction of colonial acquisition.
Craig Chalquist
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