A gap of eight years is a big slice in a writer’s life: at the end, a changed man speaks in a different context. Al McCoy’s Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972) and his Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organized Crime in Australia (1980) have the same publisher and the same villain, but they are very different books.

With Politics, an anti-war graduate student dealt a body blow to the CIA for its involvement in the dirty heroin traffic. He took to the trail in person, travelled from Marseille to Vientiane, played out one intelligence agency against another, and painted a startling novel picture. McCoy has since acquired a PhD, a job as a history lecturer, and a research assistant. He now pays terminological homage to some brand of sociology, does the right thing by historians in taking the present back to its origins, compiles a large apparatus of footnotes -and seldom goes out to see for himself.