Controlling drug use is a dynamic, global, politicized process. The article reviews it in terms of selected types of drugs; "natural levels" of drug demand and use; drug markets and the drug market environment; types of traffickers; illicit drug trade profits, approaches to drug control ("War on Drugs," "Zero Tolerance" programs and policies, and "normalizing" and legalizing selected drugs), including the UN's then relatively recent "Balanced Approach," and facets of drug law enforcement (drug prices and purity levels and values of drug seizures), including various rarely noted benefits to intervention programs and control agents. The article notes unresolved issues and needed "tools" while considering the implications of the first United Nations World Drug Report data. Links between illicit drug production and civil strife are long established, leaving little room for doubt as to why countries such as Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Colombia should feature so prominently as illicit drug cultivation, production, and manufacturing sites. Supply and use of illicit drugs is also closely linked with the following activities, among others: acquisitive crime, increases in prison populations, the sex industry, terrorism, HIV infection, public and social corruption, and the breakup of community and family units. Drug trafficking offers to those who might otherwise be faced with inevitable and unceasing poverty the possibility of "having it all and having it now," based on the perception that it is an activity which offers the prospect of maximum profit for minimum outlay, with minimum risk involved risk. As a vehicle for upward social mobility, it presents opportunities that are perhaps unrivaled. References