The vast majority of people arrested, convicted and imprisoned for drug-trafficking offences are "low-level" participants. This book argues that scapegoating has played a central role in shaping the criminal-justice drugs war, and that it is those at the bottom end of the drugs trade who give substance to its ideology and reality. The author contends that, unless drug control moves beyond its current emphasis, and beyond criminal policy and law enforcement into the arena of geopolitical analysis, international poverty, Third World debt and domestic welfare, there can be no resolution to the human tragedy which the war on drugs has come to embody.