Before Prohibition: A World of Legal Drugs
For most of human history, the production, sale, and consumption of psychoactive substances were largely unregulated. In the nineteenth-century United States, opium, morphine, cocaine, and cannabis were widely available in patent medicines, tonics, and over-the-counter preparations. Coca-Cola famously contained cocaine extract until 1903. Heroin, synthesized by Bayer in 1898, was marketed as a cough suppressant and a cure for morphine addiction. The idea that the government should criminalize the possession or use of these substances would have struck most Americans as bizarre.
The turn toward prohibition was driven by a convergence of forces: the temperance movement, Progressive Era reformism, racial anxiety, and the emergence of the United States as a global power seeking to impose international norms.
