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Earlier last year, Oxford University Press published a book called Killer High: A History of War in Six Drugs. The author of this publication is Peter Andreas, who has been working at the prestigious Brown University for a long time, specifically since 2001. In earlier years he was an academic at Harvard University, a researcher at the Brooking Institution and a member of the Social Science Research Council-MacArthur Foundation for International Peace and Security. He works at his current institution as a professor of International Studies and Political Science and International and Public Affairs. In his research scope Andreas specializes primarily in investigating the secret dimension of globalization. This includes illegal cross-border flows of people, goods, money, and information. He tries to blend the traces of the interaction between states, and the illicit flows across time and space in his publications, focussing mainly on the practice of government policing efforts and politics along and across borders. Due to such a research focus, his publications could be classified under the field of International Relations. However, in a more precise way, it could be said that their spectrum extends to the fields of security studies, political economy, history, and the study of transnational crime.
The political debate on transnational crime is still relevant in today's international environment. However, this debate sometimes seems misleading, as it does not always use terms such as "narco-terrorists", "narco-insurgents" and "narco-guerrillas" in an appropriate way. It could even be argued that through such a presentation of this issue politicians create a common tendency in society to consider the relationship between drugs and wars as a completely new phenomenon. For example, the socalled narco-trafficking is often related mainly to organized crime groups. Andreas's latest work, Killer High, comes to confront this social and political discourse. After opening it, we quickly find out that Andreas, with his research, is trying to prove that the mentioned relationship between drugs and wars is older than it might seem at first glance. Its history dates back to not only past decades but even past centuries. And Andreas sets out on this path because the mainstay of his research in Killer High is mapping the drug-war relationship from early antiquity to the present. He examines the relationship itself...