My two guesses: Middle East, 1914-18 (think T.H. Lawrence) and Southern Africa 1899-1902 (Boer War).

I'll be honest with you. It was a total guess based on your sense of irony. Also, my knowledge of the history of illicit substances is not that great.

Hmm. Seems that the first drugs law in the US was a New York state alcohol prohibition in 1845. Then localized opium-smoking prohibitions in the 1870s, mostly directed at Chinese immigrants. The first national prohibition seems to have been 1914's Harrison Tax Act, outlawing opiates and cocaine.

Of course, the issue was trafficking, which may have been illegal elsewhere....

So it could still be Civil War vintage...

Well, I figure that the US is probably a pretty good bellwether for drugs laws about the world. At the same time, the earliest real drugs law (I don't think we can count alcohol) was in the 1870s, after the US Civil War (which is what I assume you were referring to), and, in fact, during the period in which we would place the actual Wild West. While I don't think that it's necessary that the veribiage used indicates that the event happened after the Wild West, it'd seem an unlikely choice of terms to label a contemporary event that way. Which probably places this in the 20th century, as it's likely that drugs laws didn't exist until the 1870s and the Wild West itself lasted pretty much to the turn of the century.

LOL.

I totally missed that the first time.

Unredacted:

Even in the supposedly pacified areas of Cochinchina and Annam the French military occupation was purely notional. Memoirs convey a Wild West frontier atmosphere, with European civilians and administrators routinely going armed with Sten guns, and never venturing far without exchanging the latest information on which villages and roads were safe and which should be avoided. In practical terms the French Army controlled only a shifting pattern of invisible islands in the human landscape. The spaces between were roamed not only by the Viet Minh but also by various other armed groups, only some of which had direct connections with either the Communists or the Franco-Vietnamese forces. The wartime activities of the French, Japanese, British, Americans, Nationalist Chinese and Siamese had scattered South-East Asia with weapons and the vacuum following Japan's surrender was exploited by local warlords, drug smugglers, freebooting deserters, and the partisans and ragged militias of many groups and causes.

From THE LAST VALLEY Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam by Martin Windrow, page 95. Here Windrow describes the situation from around 1946 on as France tries to reestablish its colonial rule in Indochina (leading up this most famous battle/defeat in 1953-54).

Many years ago I read Bernard Fall's Hell in a Very Small Place, considered by many as the definitive book on DBP and cited with reverence by chroniclers of later Vietnam adventures like Michael Herr. So, when I saw Windrow's book I asked my self why I would want to bother. But Windrow's book is in many ways superior. He spends much more time filling in the historical background leading up to the French decision to "call Giap out" (my choice of term).

When I read this passage "Even in the supposedly pacified areas..." I couldn't help thinking of parallels to the current day, and your answers said that there are many more.

The "turning point" clue I mentioned in my last post (I think) was the role of (US-supplied) Fairchild C-119 "Flying Boxcars" at Dien Bien Phu. I remember seeing these interesting planes fly over my suburban home in the early 60s (from Hanscom AFB, or Otis AFB in Massachusetts or maybe Pease in New Hampshire, I don't know). C-119s were provided to the French for DBP by the US and were flown by American pilots of the CIA-owned Civil Air Transport, so, in terms of when the U.S. first had active combatants in Vietnam, 1953 could be considered the year the U.S. entered the war