I'm going to be lecturing about the Opium War tomorrow. I've read that a lot of American opposition to recreational drugs, including alcohol, was connected with ethnic prejudice against those who used an unfamiliar substance (opium & the Chinese, booze and the Irish, marijuana and the Mexicans, heroin and the blacks, not to mention crack), and I've come round to the view that the Chinese opposition to opium was mainly because it was an import.

Opium also always puts me in mind of libertarian stands on "substance abuse". Maybe I should raise the question of libertarianism with the students and tell them to take the World's Smallest Political Quiz, or the one at Politopia (both of these via Dr. Weevil), or maybe The Enhanced Political Quiz. I seem to remember another version, but I can't find it. Then there's the news of caffeine as the new gateway drug (via Radley Balko).

Update
As Mark Kleiman says,

Over the past twenty years, the DEA budget has about tripled in inflation-adjusted terms, while the prices of heroin and cocaine, adjusting for purity and inflation, are down about 80%. Once upon a time, DEA would have called that a mark of failure. The agency used to define its mission as making drugs expensive and hard to come by, labelling its annual calculation of the purity-adjusted price of heroin the "Performance Measurement System."

(Link via The Gweilo Diaries).

Upupdatedate
The other one I was looking for was The Political Compass