There is general agreement about the need to criminalise the production, sale and possession of certain drugs, yet the costly international apparatus around this is failing. But why do we criminalise some substances and not others? Is the purpose misguided, or the methods, or both?

Julia Buxton looks at how our current drug control regime came about from the first US-driven international meeting on drug control in 1909 that became a war with the inbuilt moral self-righteousness of the colonial era.

She also charts the evolution of the contemporary drugs market, looking at where drugs are now produced and consumed, and by whom, giving voice to those who get caught up in this world as consumers and low-level producers and sellers. Ultimately she asks, if the current strategy is patently failing, how could it be done better?