Illicit drugs and internationalism: the forgotten dimension. Essay review.

Students always look surprised when, lecturing on drug policy, I state that the international aspects of drug control policy are more significant than the domestic ones. People know about the history of the midnineteenth-century Chinese opium wars and Britain's apparent "foisting" of opium on the Chinese. But the rest is a blank. The existence since the First World War of a system of international regulation of the trade and use of narcotic drugs; and the political dimensions of that control system, do not enter public perceptions of the drugs issue. Recent Guardian articles on crop