Abstract Although it lacked a significant domestic market for internationally trafficked drugs, East Germany emerged as an important corridor for narcotics smugglers in the 1970s due to its position between supply countries in Asia and consumer countries in the West. The unique geography of West Berlin created a large market of consumers surrounded by East German territory, forcing traffickers to pass through the GDR border. Efforts by officials in both Germanys and the United States to cooperate on the problem of narcotics trafficking revealed conflicts between the geography of the Cold War—where the GDR border was the front line in the ideological conflict between East and West—and the international drug prohibition system, which sought global interstate collaboration in the name of a “universal international society,” against the common threat of crime. As Cold War tensions declined in the 1980s, border enforcement cooperation between East and West became increasingly viable as both sides reoriented toward the view that Europe had to defend itself from the threats posed by mobilities of those in the global south. 6 Similar to the effects of prohibition enforcement elsewhere, East German participation in the global anti-narcotics system not only drove the professionalization of smuggling, but also increased the profits that could be made by trafficking drugs to a relatively isolated pocket of consumers such as in West Berlin, located in the heart of East Germany. 7 The Allied occupation of Berlin during the Cold War created exploitable ambiguities of sover- eignty and control over the boundaries between the GDR and the western sectors of the divided city. American antidrug warriors imagined narcotics trafficking as part of a global communist plot, whereas East German officials understood international smuggling as a problem of capitalist social decay expanding outward from West Germany. 9 For the SED, joining the international community to stop this traffic was understood as a means of containing a pathology of Western life. In the 1970s, however, the mutual reinforcement of the drug war and the Cold War began to break down as experts on both sides of the Berlin Wall began to look positively at the prospect of East-West cooperation to suppress the common threat of international drug traffickers. Reports noted that drug searches including the use of sniffer dogs and baggage checks had been implemented at Schönefeld Airport. Most importantly, East German customs had effectively stopped smuggling from its side of the Waltersdorfer Chaussee border cross- ing, which allowed West Berliners and foreigners to travel from Schönefeld to West Berlin via a short bus connection. Smugglers would take their product from the airport to a train station locker and then meet clients at international hotels around Alexanderplatz in East Berlin to sell the locker key to the Western buyers. 54 When West Berlin officials wrote to the various West German govern- ment ministries tasked with drug enforcement to ask that the East Germans be contacted directly with this information in order to convince them to more effectively police trafficking at Friedrichstraße, West German officials confronted the question of how to do so. In coordination with the Chancellor’s Office and the Ministry for Inner-German Relations, they drafted a note to inform the East German Ministry of Health of the problem without making any accusations of complicity with the traffickers: “According to the information available, drugs are traded on the premises of the Friedrichstraße train station. There are numerous indications that members of Arab states, who often refer to themselves as Palestinians, smuggle narcotics, preferably hard drugs, into West Berlin in this way. Successful American interdiction operations against the Turkey-to-Marseille drug pipe- line known as the “French Connection” opened up a vacuum that was filled by drug traffic from Southeast Asia via major international airports such as Frankfurt, Munich, and Amsterdam, as well as on land via the so-called Balkan Route, ” 61 The West Berlin Senate publicly agreed with these accusations, and, in the Bundestag, Kurt Spitzmüller of the Free Democrats (FDP) —the junior partner in the governing social-liberal coalition led by the SPD—proclaimed, “obviously, numerous people involved in drug smuggling from the Middle and Near East come to East Berlin via East Berlin ’s Schönefeld Airport and from there to West Berlin, ” where “the mass of Turkish guest workers in West Berlin —the Kreuzberg district—has created a dangerous breeding ground for such drug-related crime. Moreover, “Every traveler can observe that our customs authorities are meticulous in fulfilling their duties—unlike the thoroughly corrupt customs agents of West Berlin. ”69 The conflict escalated the following year when American congressman Glenn English, a Democrat from Oklahoma and chair of a taskforce on drug abuse, claimed that East Germany was a “silent partner ” to drug traffickers. 82 The Stasi had informers in the West Berlin Turkish community who reported on drug dealing in East Berlin, including cannabis and valium, and on hashish and heroin trafficking via East German territory. According to the Stasi, the small-scale drug 76 William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana (Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2014), 160 –61. 96 The proliferation of international smuggling networks and the rise of Andean cocaine meant that West Germany was now also a destination for traffickers from South America and West Africa. 97 In December 1983, at a meeting of American and West German drug officials, the doubling of drug-related deaths in West Berlin that year was attributed to more smuggling via Schönefeld Airport. Of particular concern was an influx of trafficking by Sri Lankan refugees, fleeing the civil war in large numbers.