First War on Drugs

Long before the likes of Pablo Escobar, El Chapo, and the cartels of Colombia and Mexico, the world fought its first war on drugs — and it began not in the jungles of Latin America, but in the streets of London, the ports of Canada, and the shadows of imperial China.Set in the turbulent aftermath of the First World War, The First War on Drugs reveals how the criminalisation of cocaine, heroin and opium during the 1920s created a new kind of global underworld. This was the moment when modern drug trafficking was born. The men and women who seized the opportunity became the world’s first drug lords, branded by the press as “Cocaine Kings”, “Opium Kings” and “Dope Kings”, operating vast international networks in an age before surveillance, wiretaps or instant communication.Drawing on previously classified police files, intelligence reports and court records — and illustrated with never-before-seen photographs of traffickers and their associates — this book reconstructs a hidden history of corruption, ambition and moral panic. It follows notorious figures such as the enigmatic Brilliant Chang and the so-called White Queen of Limehouse, alongside international fixers, anarchists, aristocrats and journalists whose crimes reached deep into the British establishment. Some cases were quietly buried. Others triggered the earliest involvement of MI5 and MI6 in narcotics investigations.Part investigative history, part global crime story, The First War on Drugs sheds new light on how prohibition reshaped policing, politics and organised crime — and why the patterns set a century ago still define the drug wars of today.