Word: opium
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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History offers ample evidence. Ritual opium use has been traced back to Greece and Cyprus as early as 2000 B.C. The ancient Aztecs took ololiuqui (similar to LSD), peyote, marijuana and other mind benders. In the Middle Ages, witches rubbed their bodies with hallucinogenic ointments...
...fortunes of early New World merchants were amassed by trading opium and rum (as well as slaves). George Washington, historians believe, probably used hemp (marijuana) to ease his dental pains. President Ulysses Grant took cocaine in his last years while writing his memoirs, on the advice of his publisher Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain...
After the Civil War, opium use was widely tolerated in the U.S. and even extolled by some leading thinkers. Under the influence of opium, wrote Dr. George Wood, the president of the American Philosophical Society, in 1868, "the intellectual and imaginative faculties are raised to the highest point compatible with individual capacity." Doctors began prescribing opium- based concoctions for every malady from headache to skin rash. Respectable Victorian ladies calmed their babies with narcotic potions, such as Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup and Hooper's Anodyne, the Infant's Friend. Heroin, a morphine derivative, was sold legally at the turn...
...direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes in the South and other sections of the country." Southern sheriffs believed cocaine even rendered blacks impervious to .32-cal. bullets (as a result many police departments switched to .38-cal.). Chinese immigrants were blamed for importing the opium-smoking habit to the U.S. "If the Chinaman cannot get along without his dope," concluded the blue-ribbon citizens' panel, the Committee on the Acquirement of the Drug Habit, in 1903, "we can get along without him." Despite the opposition of U.S. drug companies, the government began to crack down. Many...
...backlash drove coke and opium underground. Cocaine was the narcotic of choice among some jazz-band musicians and avant-garde actors and artists, but "decent" Americans steered clear. It was Prohibition, after all, and most Americans in the years after World War I were too busy finding bootleg gin to think about more exotic intoxicants. Marijuana began arriving in large quantities in the 1920s and '30s, smoked by Mexican immigrants who came North looking for jobs. Pot, too, was regarded with horror. One 1936 propaganda film called Reefer Madness warned the nation's youth that smoking the "killer weed...