Roy K. Anderson

Roy K. Anderson is chiefly remembered as the author of Drug Smuggling and Taking in India and Burma, first published in 1922. In that book, he wrote from the perspective of someone with direct administrative experience in Burma, and the work has remained the main source by which readers know him today.

Because reliable biographical information about him is limited, only a small outline can be stated with confidence. He appears to have served as a Superintendent in the Burma Excise administration, and his writing focuses on opium, cocaine, hemp drugs, smuggling networks, and the colonial systems built to control them.

For modern listeners, his work is valuable less as a personal memoir than as a historical document. It captures the language, assumptions, and official concerns of its era while shedding light on drug policy and everyday governance in British-ruled South Asia.