The control of alcohol and other drugs (AOD) is an important feature of the global public policy landscape. There is widespread recognition that the ‘war on drugs’, rooted in international systems of drug control, has failed both on its own terms and because of the harms it has visited upon users and their communities. Although some states have moved towards liberalisation, the vast majority continue to heavily invest in punitive measures. Importantly, however, key ideas about drugs are coming under sustained pressure, and in some instances, beginning to break down, including the idea that drugs inevitably produce harms, including illness, injury and death, or that they produce other predictable, stable and consistent ‘effects’ (Fraser and Moore, 2011). There is evidence of this change in specific contexts including drug policy, health promotion and service provision. But what is happening in law courts? How are drugs being conceptualised in legal cases around the world? Scholars from a variety of disciplines have taken a keen interest in the ‘drug problem’, but there has been little scrutiny of how key cases in different jurisdictions have influenced the ways in which we understand, respond to and punish the use of various substances. The importance of such decisions extends beyond criminal matters and affects outcomes in a variety of legal spheres including immigration, welfare, family justice, education and employment law. Judging Drugs is the first book to chart the impact and significance of those cases in different parts of the world, and to consider how ideas about drugs are (or might be) changing across our courts. It thus comprises an important and distinctive addition to a body of scholarship that has sought to understand the ways in which drugs and ‘addiction’ have been subject to varying degrees of control and opprobrium. Importantly, contributors to this edited collection do not simply identify and summarise important legal cases from around the world. In this sense, the collection is not a ‘textbook’ of important case law. It is also not a textbook of cases with apparent precedent value.