How did price controls affect the worlds drug industry? Are drug prices going out of control? · from the proliferation of dark web marketplaces to the emergence of new and novel psychoactive substances (nps), these trends have generated significant and sometimes contradictory challenges to law enforcement agencies, public health systems and policymakers worldwide. How do pharmaceutical price controls affect the future? · first, it explores the centrality of heroin, particularly in afghanistan, which produces 90 percent of the world ’s illicit opium, and traces heroin’s evolution in the united states, as diversified by pharmaceutical opioids and fentanyl. How do wealthy countries contribute to the development of new drugs? · from colonial china’s opium wars to cold war us politics, we trace rise of global drug trade and its political backers. · when nations implement pharmaceutical price controls, they reduce pharmaceutical revenues, which then reduces investments in further r&d, limiting future generations’ access to new novel treatments needed to fight diseases such as cancer, alzheimer’s, heart disease, and diabetes. · despite record production levels of plant-based drugs , and a progression in some countries toward legalizing or decriminalizing cannabis a new version of the age-old drug trade , revolving. · the undoc estimate, based on local farmgate and wholesale prices constitutes, however, a very small percentage of the total turnover of the multibillion dollar afghan drug trade. This article surveys key multidisciplinary scholarship on the global drug trade from antiquity to the present, tracing the evolving and culturally contingent definitions of “ drugs. ”