Issues & Policies
Drug Use & Control, A Brief History – Overview
In the 1960s, a confluence of major political and socio-demographic events led to the counterculture movement and propelled drugs like marijuana and LSD into the cultural mainstream. An emerging drug culture, including heroin overdose deaths from returning Vietnam veterans, mobilized...
Opium & Civil War Morphine Addiction
The U.S. experienced its first major drug epidemic over 150 years ago with returning Civil War veterans addicted to morphine. At the turn of the 19th century, the U.S. was exposed to opium use and addiction from its newly acquired...
Early 20th Century Cocaine Use & Addiction
While cocaine was first synthesized in 1856, it did not become widely commercially available until the early 20th century. Coca Cola even used small amounts of cocaine in its beverage from 1886-1900. Yet, it wasn’t until the early 20th century...
The 1906 U.S. Food & Drug Act and the First International Opium Conference
To address nascent drug use and abuse, the U.S. Congress passed the Food and Drug Act in 1906. The Food and Drug Act’s main purpose was to ban foreign and interstate traffic of all adulterated and mislabeled food and drug...
The Harrison Act of 1914
In the U.S., continued growing alarm over drug addiction, the rising Temperance Movement for alcohol, and a desire to maintain credibility with its international partners upon pushing for the 1912 Opium Convention, motivated the U.S. to pass its first major...
The 1961 U.N. Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs
In 1961, in an effort to incorporate the discovery and growing use of synthetic opioids such as methadone, as well as cannabis and drugs with similar effects that were not a part of previous treaties, the U.N. developed the Single...