ABSTRACT
Cross-border police cooperation to fight drugs or other forms of serious international crime has a long tradition that goes back, at least, to the period after the First World War. Already in the 1930s, for example, the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics had deployed a number of drug liaison officers to Europe (Nadelmann 1993: 99), and Franco-American investigations into the heroin trade from France to the United States were also conducted (Cusack 1974: 235). In those early days, however, cross-border drug enforcement was hardly an issue of high politics. This changed dramatically in the early 1970s, when the Nixon administration increased bilateral and multilateral efforts to intensify drug abuse control (Nixon 1971; Gross 1972).
