Mary Ryder is a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom, researching drug use and armed conflict in Colombia. This project brings together her fieldwork based at Corporación Viviendo in Cali, Colombia, and research experience at the Colombian Truth Commission. She also works at Transform Drug Policy Foundation.

In 2022, the Colombian Truth Commission's final report concluded that decades of vast resources poured into the 'war on drugs' had not alleviated the country's conflict but, in fact, exacerbated it. The moral crusade imposed by drug prohibition has shaped perceptions about people who use drugs as being to blame for fueling drug-trafficking and associated violence in Colombia, narratives which have been used by both state and non-state actors to justify repressive practices against them. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2023-24 with marginalised young people accessing a harm reduction program in Cali, Southwest Colombia, this research explores how people who use drugs have been constructed as an internal "enemy," military targets to be eliminated within the broader context of war, through their own memories of such events. The life trajectories of the young people who participated in this research show that drug use has also featured heavily in the practices of warfare, functioning as a recruitment tool and as a means of coping with the trauma of war. This research argues that the stigmatisation and persecution of people who use drugs under the ‘war on drugs’ logic are ongoing forms of violence that contribute to the persistence and latency of Colombia’s conflict and undermine peacebuilding efforts. It calls for a fundamental reframing of drug use, moving away from the view that holds people who use drugs as a problem or a threat, and instead positions drug use as a serious human rights issue, emphasising how people who use drugs have been systematically victimised and persecuted within Colombia’s armed conflict. To conclude, moving from conflict to ‘drug peace’ now requires legally regulated drug markets grounded in human rights and harm reduction, otherwise this destructive cycle of violence will persist and people who use drugs will remain extremely vulnerable to harm.