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The United States has been long the global leader in turning drug control into an international policing or military enterprise, though the drug war’s long periodization is harder to define. This chapter surveys three phases in the rise of the US global drug war. The first, at the start of the twentieth century, involved opiates and drug diplomacy in Asia and US colonial possessions. The second phase followed World War II, when drug interdiction first became an American global enterprise, alongside growing US Cold War influence. Skeptical of public health strategies and diplomatic efforts, Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger turned to international policing and source control, by federal agents abroad, starting as clandestine operations in Europe and the Mediterranean and later the Middle East and Asia. The third phase began with creation of the DEA in 1973 and the militarization of cocaine interdiction in the Americas during the 1980s.

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