Droga legal - menos crime

Até o começo da primeira guerra mundial quase todas as drogas eran legais. 



"... For most of U.S. history, all drugs were legal. How legal? ... a 9-year-old girl could walk into a drug store and buy heroin. In fact, before Bayer sold aspirin, it sold Heroin™ as a "sedative for coughs." (As a German company, Bayer was forced to give up the trademark after World War I under the Treaty of Versailles.) One heroin-laced cough syrup promised in its mail-order catalog: "It will suit the palate of the most exacting adult or the most capricious child." Cocaine, first manufactured by Merck, was popular, too. Parke-Davis (which is now a subsidiary of Pfizer) advertised a "cocaine kit" that it promised could "supply the place of food, make the coward brave, the silent eloquent and . . . render the sufferer insensitive to pain." Late-nineteenth century advertisements for "Cocaine Toothache Drops" promised users (including children such as those depicted in the ads) an "instantaneous cure." Another popular product, "Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup," contained one grain (65 mg) of morphine per ounce, and was marketed to mothers to quiet restless infants and children. McCormick (the spice company) and others sold "paregoric," a mixture of highly concentrated alcohol with opium, as a treatment for diarrhea, coughs, and pain, with instructions on the bottle for infants, children, and adults. Another medication called laudanum was similar, but with 25 times the opium.  Heroin and opium were both marketed as asthma treatments, too. And, of course, cocaine was an ingredient in Coca-Cola from 1886 until 1900. 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.
Marketing heroin to children? Putting coke in Coke? Many people would take all this as evidence that of course the government needed to step in and do something. But the widespread availability of these products did not cause the disaster one might expect. In hindsight, it may not seem right that people casually took narcotics or routinely gave them to their children..."
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