This collection provides a panoramic look at the world's drug plants, their cultivation, harvesting, marketing, and use. It also considers in some detail the social, economic, political, and, to some extent, environmental effects of drug-plant cultivation on the lands and peoples involved. It is a useful if depressing catalogue of the usually dismal impacts upon rural peoples of one of the world's older and bigger businesses.

The book has 13 chapters. The first is a general introduction and orientation, and the last is mainly a summary of salient points made throughout the book. The second chapter is a 90-page history of efforts to regulate international drug traffic and the production of drug plants, chiefly within the last 100 years. The author, Alf McCoy, is extremely critical of US and UN efforts to combat drugs, arguing that these have been at best worthless and often counterproductive. He gives particular emphasis to the last 50 years and to the Cold War deals made between the CIA and unsavory kingpins in southeast Asia and Afghanistan. If half of what McCoy says is true, it amounts to an indictment of CIA methods, as well as a sad lesson in unintended consequences. To make trouble for communist China and the USSR, the CIA made common cause with warlords in remote areas of Burma and Afghanistan, provided them with guns and money, and turned a blind eye (or worse) as the warlords became drug lords to help finance operations. McCoy argues further that efforts to eradicate the drug trade, when temporarily successful, normally relocated and expanded production because of the stimulus effect of heightened prices. So fighting the Cold War (by the CIA's chosen methods) and fighting the various wars on drugs exacted an enormous human price from peasants in Burma and Afghanistan, as well as from junkies in Rome, Glasgow, and New York.

The balance of the chapters is devoted to regional and local studies. Laos, Afghanistan, Bolivia, Peru, and Mexico are represented, as one might expect. But so are marijuana production in southern Belize and nineteenth-century Bengal, peyote in South Texas, kava in Oceania, and opium suppression in the early years of Mao's China. These regional chapters have variable emphases; the editors apparently did not insist on much uniformity in the writing of the chapters. But together they give a large-scale, if pointillist impression of the issues involved in drug-plant cultivation. The chief plants in question are coca and the opium poppy, although marijuana appears prominently in three chapters as well.

For readers of this journal, the most interesting feature of the book is the frequency with which mountain areas have lately become the setting for the cultivation of drug plants. This is mainly a response to their prohibition, which in broad terms is about 100 years old. As an illegal activity, drug production has shifted to remote areas, areas easily defended by a small militia, and areas where law enforcement is feeble or easily corruptible. For the opium poppy, this has meant a gradual relocation from the plains of Bengal, Anatolia, and China to the mountains of Laos, Thailand, Burma, and Afghanistan. The geography of opium production shifted from time to time in response to the local effectiveness of prohibition efforts and to larger political changes (such as the breakdown of the USSR). The coca plant is a little fussier in its ecological requirements and historically has only done well on the foothills of the eastern Andes, but production zones have also shifted among Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia in accordance with political and market factors. Mountain peoples found that opium and coca were among the few crops that carried sufficient value per unit of weight to make economically worthwhile the long voyages to distant markets. But they also often found themselves in the middle of crossfires conducted by ruthless militias and armies. So there is a good deal here, little of it cheerful, on the mountains and mountain peoples of southeast and South Asia, and the central and northern Andes.

The research behind these chapters is often impressive. As one who has done a tiny bit of research concerning kif production in northern Morocco, I have a profound respect for the dangers involved in this sort of work, and marvel at those who have done it well in places such as Laos in the early 1970s or Afghanistan in the 1980s. For the research alone, this collection is a valuable one. Its wide-ranging coverage adds further value. Oxford University Press did not outdo itself in producing the maps and photographs, nor is the index done to a high standard. But if you want to know about the consequences of the cultivation of the opium poppy or coca leaf, this is the book to read.