The production, processing and trading of illegal drugs have nearly always been studied from the standpoint of the negative effects on human health and the laundering of drug money. Yet in the drug producing countries these are economic activities like any other: they create jobs and generate income, finance the national economy, they contribute to the balance of payments as well as to exchange rate stability. Where the drug producing country is a poor country, the drug problem becomes an issue of under-development and strategies for combating drug cultivation and trade cannot ? and indeed should not ? avoid posing the problem in terms of development.