In February 1935, a French intelligence officer reported a plan, by smugglers from Aleppo, to transport ca. 188kg of hashish from Turkish Aintab to their Syrian hometown. From there, the suspects intended to bring the drugs, by car, to Lebanon’s capital, Beirut. Once the drugs had arrived, an accomplice was to place a telephone call to the Palestinian port city of Haifa to ask a drug smuggler, ‘Abud Y?sin, to come to Lebanon and organize shipment via Palestine to Egypt. Although this plan came to naught, it illustrates how, with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, innumerable people became involved in the smuggling of hashish and opium across and beyond the new borders of French Mandatory Lebanon and Syria and British Mandatory Palestine, most often to Egypt. Although not only drugs, but arms, people, and a variety of legal goods, too, were trafficked, trans-border movements have remained a step-child of research on the Mandate period. A focus on political protest has obscured the existence, also, of wide-spread clandestine routines of evasion. More fundamentally, scholars have tacitly assumed that social realities corresponded to the ink on newly drawn maps. Taking single polities – Lebanon, Palestine, etc. – as frameworks of analysis, they have ignored the Levant’s ‘Abud Y?sins. The underlying claim of this talk, then, is that the Levantine Mandates cannot be adequately comprehended one by one, and that drug smuggling allows us to re-think the history of the Levant as an area characterized by the interplay of local and regional factors. This claim is showcased by the trade chains characteristic of regional drug smuggling across the Levant. Professional smugglers worked with (sometimes politically active) large-scale hashish or opium growers; poorer people who happened to live in neuralgic places – typically near a border or in a city with a transport hub – traded small amounts of drugs over short distances. Together, they formed a complex regional system of narcotics demand and supply. Using colonial archival sources, newspapers, and oral history, I will show in this talk how that system, pre-dating World War I, continued to exist despite the new post-World War I reality of separate countries and their new borders, administrative practices, and political economies. More crucially, the social patterns, geographies, and economic and political root causes of that regional system changed because of these separate local realities, which were in turn affected by the regional setting.