Visit the military section in any bookstore to see how alluringly popular the subject of war is. This is unsurprising, because we are storytelling animals. We need narratives to make sense of the world. And we tell war stories through kaleidoscopic lenses, mostly of battles and weapons, commanders and GIs, victories and debacles. But one facet of warfare has persistently been overlooked: the use of intoxicants. Startlingly so, as they have accompanied warfare since antiquity. Fortunately, psychopharmacological military studies have recently emerged to remedy this oversight, and the new book by Peter Andreas is the latest addition to this field.

Being an impressive and seductive storyteller of taste and style, Andreas offers an exciting and exacting “drugged” autopsy of war and politics. The main virtue of Killer High is the clear-cut taxonomy of the intimate, albeit ambiguous, synergy between intoxicants and warfare. The five catchword categories introduced for exploring the mind-altering landscape of war are sharp and compelling: “war while on drugs” (used by combatants), “war through drugs” (funding war making), “war for drugs” (imposing drug trade/consumption through force or subversion), “war against drugs” (combating illicit manufacture and trafficking), and “drugs after war” (the changing postbellum patterns of drug production, regulation, and consumption). This classification provides a valuable, yet not all-inclusive, framework. One distinctive form of the nexus, which we may call “war with drugs”—attempts to weaponize intoxicants so as to incapacitate opponents—is missing. With this additional category the author’s task of retelling “the history of war through the lens of drugs” (p. 2) could perhaps be more complete.

Andreas is selective and rightly so. He recognizes six compounds, mostly (but not exclusively) stimulants, as the historically significant war intoxicants. Three are not painfully controversial and remain in general use today: alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine. The others are the dark characters of the global drama of prohibitive drug policies: opium (along with opiates and opioids), amphetamines, and cocaine. Hallucinogens and cannabis are missing. Andreas may be right that their role is not as equally prevalent as his six drugs of choice, but still they have for centuries, every now and then, accompanied war making. Seeming somehow uneasy with the exclusion of cannabis, Andreas incorporates it into the conclusion, yet only for comparative purposes. The assertion that, despite its widespread use, “cannabis does not score high in importance on any single dimension” (p. 254) of his taxonomy is, however, debatable and calls for more substantiated evidence.

Intoxication-fueled fighting, or the killer high, is not, as the title might suggest, the leading theme of the study. The author is interested in the relationship between drugs and policy and war making much more than in “war by drugs.” His main focus is state-centric and realist: the embedding in and interplay between war intoxicants and the political. In that respect, the book achieves its goal of showing that the predominant aspect of this interplay is state interests. This leitmotif draws on Charles Tilly’s famous observation that “states made war and war made states.” Andreas neatly demonstrates that drugs made war while war made drugs; for instance, from rum as the enabler of the imperial power-projection capabilities of the British Royal Navy to opium imposed on China to profit the British Empire and its global balance of trade. Thus governments have been the ones to prescribe and proscribe intoxicants. States have been the ones to wage wars for drugs (e.g., the Opium Wars), by drugs (e.g., the German authorities doling out methamphetamine to their troops in World War II), and against drugs (e.g., the contemporary cocaine wars). Intoxicants, Andreas argues cogently, have been used to maximize power (revenues from taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and other substances, as well as from illicit drug production and trafficking) and exercise power (enhancing one’s combat performance and drugging an enemy population to undermine its resilience). He aptly catches the very ambiguous role of states: from exploiting intoxicants to hunting them down and adversely facilitating the criminal undergrounds that have occasionally conducted shadowy business with governments.

One of Andreas’s ostensible tasks is to write the psychopharmacological history of some landmark events. The result, even though not a radically alternative reading, is interesting: from rum as the catalyst of the American War of Independence to tea as the trigger of the rebellion that led to it. Killer High also convincingly portrays the link between war and the shifting patterns of substance use, with an exemplary chapter on tobacco that flows smoothly from a discussion of pipes to cigars to cigarettes. Moreover, Andreas illuminatingly reveals the paradoxical exchange between counterinsurgency/counterterrorism and counternarcotic efforts fostered by the militarization of the war on drugs. Finally, the conclusion provides some refreshingly inspiring foresight on the future of the drugs–war nexus.

I am, however, not completely convinced by the book, and there are some shortcomings. The first concerns originality. The main novelty, although it is not entirely new, is the taxonomy of drugs-and-war as outlined in the introduction. But herein lies both the strength and weakness of the book, because what follows in the chapters on specific psychoactive agents can disappoint as the narrative ping-pongs between different categories. Take the story of opium: it begins with the drug’s revenue-generating potential (for the British Empire), moves to its eroding effect on combat performance (of the mid-nineteenth-century Chinese soldiers), then to its subversive effects as a weapon of mass social debilitation (against Chinese society), returns to its role in bankrolling military operations (from Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists to the Taliban), to eventually turn to the global war on opium. The subject is certainly complex, and drugs have often played multiple roles, but as the narrative unfolds, the author’s attention wanders and the five-category framework of intoxicants-in-war becomes blurred. In the end, this taxonomical mélange leaves an impression of vagueness and incoherence that cannot be overcome by the summarizing synthesis of each and every drug and their importance for each and every category (table 1, p. 253). The study could have gained in sharpness and clarity if one single war drug was illustrative predominantly for each category. This would require a slightly different selection of substances and their much narrower analysis, especially because general, all-embracing approaches are already available.

Which brings me to the second problem: the book relies fairly heavily on other well-known sources and far too often turns to their shortening and rehashing. So, should you want to learn something new about, say, methamphetamine in the Nazi war effort, you will be disappointingly served with a summary of, in the main, Norman Ohler’s book (Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, 2017). This is also the case with other drugs and contexts. Andreas masterfully recycles, sometimes in truly intoxicating writing, but this makes Killer High not a sequel but a clever remake. And some fragments will hammer you with quote after quote that are at times overly long (e.g., pp. 73, 115–18). One would expect a major contribution to the pharmacological study of war/politics to be more than a rich tertiary source. Another great opportunity is missed when it comes to the book’s theoretical and methodological input. Taxonomy apart, Andreas does not offer any in-depth approach (which could be drawn from either political science, war studies, or drug use and control policies) to lift the subject up to an advanced analytical level. An engaging and illuminating retelling of fascinating and abundant anecdotal stories is one thing; delivering a definitive, original, and conceptually embedded scholarly study is another.

All in all, however, Killer High makes for a highly readable and systematized mind map for thinking about drugs in various war- and policy-making contexts. As such it should encourage a new reading of armed conflict and politics in global history.