The essays explore the following themes, among others: the early manufacture, sale and control of cocaine in the United States; Amsterdam's complex cocaine network; Japan and the unknown Southeast Asian cocaine industry; export of cocaine prohibitions to Peru; and sex, drugs, and race in London. The book looks from global and interdisciplinary perspectives by comparing and connecting the key international players and places in the definition of early cocaine. It focuses on the core analytical question of how cocaine suddenly erupted and spread into a global drug and how that process inverted after 1900, leading to its international pariah status and working (or not-so-working) regimes of prohibition. It explores what it was like when drugs such as cocaine were freely available on the market and in the culture, how drugs got redefined as socially menacing and how those broad processes unfolded across varying countries, contexts, and cultures. The book includes a brief historiography of cocaine as well as discussion of converging methodological concerns and a social, political, or cultural constructionist view of drugs. Notes, primary sources, tables, figure, bibliography, index