![]() The Mexican military was deployed against heavily armed trafficking organizations in a drug war that has so far claimed well over 100,000 lives. Colombian left-wing insurgents and right-wing paramilitaries used the cocaine trade to fund their war against each other. US Cold Warriors turned a blind eye to heroin trafficking by anti-Communist allies in Southeast and Southwest Asia. Nazi troops ingested millions of methamphetamine tablets to stay awake during the Blitzkrieg. American temperance advocates exploited intense anti-German sentiment during World War I to pass Prohibition. ![]() ![]() Britain went to war with China over the opium trade. Boston protesters dumped tea and sparked a revolution. Roman legions introduced wine to France through imperial conquest. It also suggests that as a counterbalance to contemporary accounts stressing the growing threat posed by drug-financed violent nonstate actors, we should recognize the many ways in which the centuries-old nexus between drugs and war has also been about statecraft and the pursuit of the state's strategic objectives. Placing both history and a wider range of drugs (legal and illegal) front and center in the analysis provides a corrective that allows for a fuller and richer understanding of the multiple linkages between psychoactive substances and warfare. The common tendency is to privilege illegal drugs such as cocaine and heroin in the contemporary era over the historical centrality of legal drugs such as tobacco and alcohol in relation to armed conflict. Political scientists and other scholars have typically either ignored the drugs–war relationship or focused on only one dimension. The review provides empirical illustrations across times, places, and drugs to demonstrate the importance of each of these dimensions. What is the relationship between psychoactive drugs and war? This review article identifies and traces five key dimensions of this relationship: war while on drugs, war for drugs, war through drugs, war against drugs, and drugs after war.
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