Tobacco and opium were the first drugs governments tried to ban
Long before modern drug laws, tobacco smoking was outlawed by authorities in Russia, Austria, Germany, New Spain and the Ottoman Empire, and Qing emperors banned opium smoking in 1730, 1796 and 1800. Yet opium smuggled by the East India Company kept flowing into China, a sign of how hard such bans are to enforce.
Before the twentieth century, most governments made little effort to police recreational drugs. China was the great exception. Beginning in the eighteenth century the East India Company shipped Indian opium to Chinese merchants, building an illegal market so large that by 1838 China had somewhere between four and twelve million addicts. Qing officials responded with ever harsher crackdowns.
Western states moved later. Britain restricted opium sales through the Pharmacy Act of 1868. In the United States, opium stayed a matter for individual states until the Harrison Act of 1914, passed after twelve powers signed the First International Opium Convention in 1912. National alcohol prohibition, in force from 1920 until about 1933, showed the pitfalls: it proved nearly impossible to enforce and handed criminal groups, including the emerging American Mafia, a vast business in making, smuggling and selling liquor.
The scale today is enormous. One think tank put the global illicit drug market at between 426 and 652 billion dollars in 2014, close to 1 percent of world trade. Transit states often suffer most. In Guinea-Bissau, drug smuggling is estimated to be worth nearly twice the national economy, and a police officer's monthly wage of about 106 dollars is less than 2 percent of the value of a single kilogram of cocaine, which makes bribery easy. Traffickers launder profits by building houses with illicit cash and selling them for clean money.
A leaked report from a British government strategy unit estimated that the high cost of heroin and cocaine drove a large share of property crime, including 85 percent of shoplifting and most burglaries, costing the country 16 billion pounds a year. Penalties for trafficking vary widely, typically depending on the drug, the quantity and whether sales involve minors.
Source: Illegal drug trade
