The literature on drugs and drug prohibition, especially if one includes the medical literature, is effectively infinite, in excess of what an individual could read in a lifetime. The sources referenced in this volume themselves, other than archival, include a large number of books, academic articles and press materials, only a tiny selection of which are discussed below. I have chosen to organize recommended reading thematically. General sources on specific drugs nevertheless include Paul Gootenberg’s Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug (Durham, NC, 2008) and Nicolas Rasmussen’s On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine (New York, 2008). Among archival sources, of particular importance internationally are the various reports by the United Nations agencies and, before them, those of the League of Nations. Few of these are accessible to the general reader, but the full series of UNODC’s World Drug Report (Vienna, 1997–) are available online, on the agency’s website.
There exists a rich literature on the Opium Wars, among which the best narrative works, in the English language, are undoubtedly Peter Ward Fay, The Opium War, 1840–1842 (Durham, NC, 1975) for the First Opium War, and J. Y. Wong, Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism and the Arrow War (Cambridge, 1998) for its follow-on. As to their prelude or background, and on opium in Qing China, both David Anthony Bello, Opium and the Limits of Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2005), and Stephen Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age (New York, 2018) are excellent works.
The principal challenge to the idea of opium as nineteenth-century drug plague is probably to be found in Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann and Zhou Xun, Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China (London, 2004), whose sometimes over-enthusiastic views are tempered by Melissa Macauley in her remarkable article ‘Small Time Crooks: Opium, Migrants, and the War on Drugs in China, 1819–1860’, Late Imperial China, XXX/1 (2009). For the rest of Asia, the references are more disparate, but it is worth mentioning James Rush, Opium to Java: Revenue Farming and Chinese Enterprise in Colonial Indonesia, 1860–1910 (Ithaca, NY, 1990).
The master work on opium in nineteenth-century Britain and up to the first drugs acts is Virginia Berridge, Opium and the People, 2nd edn (London, 1999). On cannabis, a reference is James Mills, Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition, 1800–1928 (Oxford, 2003). The literature on the United States is notably broad. Steven Belenko’s Drugs and Drug Policy in America: A Documentary History (New York, 2000) contains and comments on a wealth of extracts from primary sources. Both David Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1987) and David Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge, MA, 2001) are otherwise key reference works.
Outside the Anglosphere, an important volume is Jean-Jacques Yvorel, Les Poisons de l’esprit (Paris, 1992), though it is available only in French. On Mexico, Isaac Campos’s Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs (Durham, NC, 2012) is well worth consulting. The book by Kathleen Lodwick, Crusaders against Opium: Protestant Missionaries in China, 1874–1917 (Lexington, KY, 1996), straddles the United States and China and is an invaluable record of turn-of-the-century anti-opium missionary activity and influence.
On addiction concepts, finally, the most important sources are German, but the classic Eduard Levinstein, Die Morphiumsucht (Berlin, 1877) was also published in English as Morbid Craving for Morphia (London, 1878). Essential original materials also include, of course, Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 2nd edn (London, 1856) and Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours, Du Hachisch et de l’aliénation mentale (Paris, 1845).
The literature on the key period that was the League of Nations era and the early days of the UN remains underdeveloped. Two notable works include Arnold Taylor, American Diplomacy and the Narcotics Traffic, 1900–1939 (Durham, NC, 1969) and William McAllister, Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (London, 2000), though both tend to take an American more than an international perspective. On the trials and tribulations of oversees drug suppression in the late twentieth century, I otherwise recommend highly both Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago, IL, 1991) and Cornelius Friesendorf, U.S. Foreign Policy and the War on Drugs: Displacing the Cocaine and Heroin Industry (Abingdon, 2007). A dissenting voice highlighting the war on drug’s occasional successes, notably, is James Windle’s Suppressing Illicit Opium Production: Successful Intervention in Asia and the Middle East (London, 2016).
A proper account of the French Connection’s rise and fall remains to be written, but the contemporary Newsday, The Heroin Trail (London, 1975) provides a detailed description of its functioning before it was dismantled. The sources on the main drug lords are likewise surprisingly fragmented, but Mark Bowden’s Killing Pablo, 2nd edn (New York, 2016) is worthy of mention on Pablo Escobar, and the most information-rich work on Khun Sa is probably Bertil Lintner’s Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency since 1948 (Boulder, co, 1999). Clare Hargreaves’s Snowfields: The War on Cocaine in the Andes (New York, 1992), on Bolivia, represents a feat of journalistic reporting.
Time has been lacking for enough works to have appeared on the last two to three decades. An important academic reference is nevertheless James Inciardi, The Drug Legalization Debate, 2nd edn (London, 1999). Chris McGreal, American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts (London, 2018) is a noteworthy piece of investigative journalism on the American opioid crisis. Alyson Martin and Nushin Rashidian, A New Leaf: The End of Cannabis Prohibition (New York, 2014) offers an equally readable account of marijuana legalization in the USA. Depicting the fraying international consensus, finally, is the invaluable tome by David Bewley-Taylor, International Drug Control: Consensus Fractured (Cambridge, 2012).