Monstrous substance: ‘Tuci’, pharmacopolitical assemblages and spectral materialities

This article critically examines the ‘Tuci’ (or "pink cocaine") phenomenon as an epistemic, cultural, and pharmacopolitical object, proposing its conceptualization as a monstrous substance. Two common assumptions in institutional and media discourses are problematized: that ‘Tuci’ is a counterfeit of 2C-B and that its identity is defined by the presence of ketamine. Using an approach that articulates Foucauldian poststructuralism, neomaterialisms, and decolonial studies, the authors dismantle these premises and propose a dense performative, speculative, and ontopolitical reading of the phenomenon. The article proposes a reading that describes how ‘Tuci’ not only acts on the body, but also produces it as an effect of material and discursive assemblages. It shows how this substance does not refer to an original nor can it be fixed in a stable composition, but is defined by its affective operativity, its contextual modulation and its performative adoption in liminal youth niches. Through two key concepts, monstrosity and decolonial critique, the essay proposes new grammar for understanding what ‘Tuci’ is and does. It concludes that this substance demands an epistemological shift towards a politics of drugs that recognises the mutability, relationality and power of the unclassifiable.