The beginning of the end of prohibition: the politics of drug addiction

Abstract

Misuse of drugs such as opium, cocaine and cannabis was common around the world before the First World War and it provided a valuable market for the colonial powers. There seems to have been a brief period of sobriety between the two World Wars, along with widespread criminalisation of drug dealing and use, followed by an explosion of the illicit drug market and the hugely expensive US-led ‘war on drugs'. The cost and impracticality of drug criminalisation, together with changes in Western public opinion, mean that cannabis legalisation has very recently been accepted in some countries and drug prohibition is being dismantled.