ABSTRACT
There is a feeling widely shared across time and space that narcotic drugs are a dangerous borderline phenomenon which can engender considerable harm to the drug user and his or her social environment. But although drug use is mostly associated with a vague feeling of opprobrium, taken by itself this does not lead to coercive action. To legitimize the repression of drug users and traders, it takes a formal prohibition regime specifying which substances, for example cocaine or tobacco, and which kinds of behaviour, as for example trafficking or consumption, shall be proscribed. The twentieth century saw the development of such a ‘global prohibition regime’, first at the League of Nations and later at the United Nations.1
