Men find it difficult to write with restraint when the subject is some lingering social evil, but this work is marked by good judgement and temperate language. In that it has great advantage over shrill tomes on the narcotics problem; it is more easily heard, so to speak, and more easily understood.

The authors know their subject from long official experience. Mr. Anslinger has been United States Commissioner of Narcotics for not quite a quarter century and Mr. Tomkins, a United States attorney for New Jersey , was head of that state's committee on the study of narcotics. They have put together in twelve well-organized chapters the whole history of the drug evil. Everything is amply documented, and if the historic portions seem fragmentary it is due altogether to space limitations. There are no great gaps to puzzle the reader.

The book is swiftly and cleanly paced. It begins with mention of the poppy in the tablets in the Land of Sumer. It brings the story of the dread poppy by-products into the halls of the United Nations in our own time; shows how nations of the world still contend for rigid rules, or patterns, to curb abandoned use of the poppy's gifts.

Almost every book has a villain. In this work the addling drugs share the role with Communist China. The authors seem to have strong evidence that a goodly part of the illegal drug supply is grown and processed in china; that it is spread with cold deliberation to other countries to provide China with dollars for war and to weaken the health and moral fiber of nations it holds as enemies.

Japan, Southeastern Asia and the United States are the main areas of exploitation, the authors maintain, and they quote the Toa News Service in Hong Kong to that effect. This source names the names of the Chinese Communist leaders involved in the exploitation, gives the dates of their meetings on the subject; tells how they arranged distribution and sales patterns

There are legal texts and a glossary of terms used in the traffic, most of them of underworld origin. The work is well indexed, too. On the other hand, it is not light reading. It will be useful to the student of sociology, to law-enforcement and to legislators, but it's not the kind of thing to curl up with for an afternoon of good cheer.