There is growing alarm over how drugs empower terrorists,
insurgents, militias, and gangs. But by looking back not just years
and decades but centuries, Peter Andreas reveals that the
drugs-conflict nexus is actually an old story, and that powerful
states have been its biggest beneficiaries. In his path-breaking
Killer High, Andreas shows how six psychoactive drugs-ranging from
old to relatively new, mild to potent, licit to illicit, natural to
synthetic-have proven to be particularly important war ingredients.
This sweeping history tells the story of war from antiquity to the
modern age through the lens of alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, opium,
amphetamines, and cocaine. Beer and wine drenched ancient and
medieval battlefields, and the distilling revolution lubricated the
conquest and ethnic cleansing of the New World. Tobacco became
globalized through soldiering, with soldiers hooked on smoking and
governments hooked on taxing it. Caffeine and opium fueled imperial
expansion and warfare. The commercialization of amphetamines in the
twentieth century energized soldiers to fight harder, longer, and
faster, while cocaine stimulated an increasingly militarized drug
war that produced casualty numbers surpassing most civil wars. As
Andreas demonstrates, armed conflict has become progressively more
drugged with the introduction, mass production, and global spread
of mind-altering substances. As a result, we cannot understand the
history of war without including drugs, and we similarly cannot
understand the history of drugs without including war. From ancient
brews and battles to meth and modern warfare, drugs and war have
grown up together and become addicted to each other.
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