The British Empire has rightly received history’s condemnation for pushing its colonies’ opium on China—waging the two Opium Wars to do so in the nineteenth century. Those supplies took what had been a minor problem in China and created a drug scourge that would afflict that country for a century. Today in our hemisphere, Mexican traffickers’ role in creating and spreading these drugs is just as undeniable and corrosive. Mexico’s response has more than just failed. On the contrary, a new book by historian Benjamin Smith, The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade, shows that elements
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