The debate over illegal drugs in the U.S. has long focused on legalization versus increased prosecution, treatment versus harsher sentences. But what’s been missing on both sides of the debate is a meaningful understanding of the history and politics behind drug production and prohibition. What’s the relationship, for example, between the Cold War and skyrocketing drug use in the U.S. and Europe? And why is it that, in the nearly one hundred years since the U.S. passed its first antidrug law, the global traffic in drugs has grown astronomically?