Conclusion

Subsequent American efforts to export a global war on drugs differed from those of the American anti-vice activists who had preceded them—while remaining just as dependent on the use of undercover tactics. American efforts to develop a shared abolitionist agenda for the interdiction of narcotics featured not only the diplomacy of Harry Anslinger and his fellow delegates to the League of Nations, but also American efforts, in the latter half of the twentieth century, to export reforms that legalized undercover tactics for the war on drugs. If the American anti-vice delegation’s failed efforts to press an abolitionist agenda on the League of Nations provided a blueprint for how not to use undercover tactics in the international arena, the lessons learned would help refine the American efforts to press for international action against the narcotics trade and to export undercover tactics through cooperation between law enforcement agencies and through legal reforms by which international partners could ratify the use of undercover tactics. American efforts to export a war on drugs accomplished against narcotics what the private abolitionist failed to accomplish against prostitution: exporting both the vice enforcement agenda and the means by which foreign law enforcement advances it.