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This article discusses coercion and its unintended consequences which focused on a study of heroin trafficking in Southeast and South West Asia. Considering history as a guide, it was predicted that Asia's opium production may increase to levels that will defeat the war on drugs being waged by the U.S. and the United Nations. Opium production is soaring in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and Latin America. According to U.S. State Department statistics, global opium production nearly doubled in the past decade from 2,200 tons in 1987 to 4,300 tons in 1996. Driven by growing supplies of cheap, pure heroin, drug use is rising in established markets and spreading rapidly into new markets. The reasons for such outlook are said to be historical. Looking back over the last three centuries of the modern opium trade, two major Western policy regimes towards narcotics can be discerned. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the great powers were aggressive in their promotion of a free trade in opium. This legal commerce produced a steady increase in world opium production which reached a historic high of 41,000 tons in 1906. During the nineteenth century, this commerce made opium a commodity that enmeshed Asian poppy farmers and urban addicts in a complex global economy. This succession of policy regimes, from free trade to prohibition, has created a vast illicit commerce that may well survive any attempt at suppression.