When All Drugs Were Legal

When All Drugs Were Legal

For most of U.S. history, all drugs were legal. How legal? .. "Few people are aware that before World War I, a 9-year-old girl could walk into a drug store and buy heroin." .. All these products were available "over the counter." A doctor, pharmacist, or anyone else could advertise them and sell them with no prescription or other special permission. Drugs were like any other good on the market.

Opium addiction rose in the decades after the Civil War, but soon so did education and understanding about drugs and their addictive, dangerous nature among both physicians and the public. The rise of mass media helped .. Meanwhile, the market produced safer medicines, such as aspirin. As a result of these factors, addiction peaked near the end of the nineteenth century and then began a long decline without any need for a government "war."

.. there was virtually none of the violence, death, and crime we associate with the present-day drug problem. Most drug users were not street criminals; instead, the typical addict was, as author Mike Gray put it, "a middle-aged southern white woman strung out on laudanum." Many or most opium addicts led more or less normal lives and managed to keep their addiction hidden .. there was no real crisis when all drugs were legal.