A orígem da "guerra contra drogas"

Anthony Gregory explica: "... Indeed it was in California that the war on drugs began. The 1875 Opium Dens Ordinance, mostly targeting Chinese immigrants, forever marked San Francisco as a pioneer among prohibitionist municipalities. A state-level law in 1891 mandated warning labels for opium. In 1907 California required prescriptions for opium sales and the drug and paraphernalia were banned statewide in 1909. The same year the U.S. sent Hamilton Wright to the Opium Commission in Shanghai to contemplate a global ban.
On a national level, the United States was a radically free country, as far as drugs were concerned, until the early 20^th century. A 1906 federal law involved small interventions into the drug market but it wasn’t until 1914, in the middle of the horrible Wilson administration, that the Harrison Narcotics Act was signed, signifying the beginning of the end for American drug freedom and so many other liberties that have fallen as collateral damage. For almost a century it’s been a nearly uninterrupted avalanche of prohibitionist nonsense and despotism.
The 1914 Act regulated opium and cocaine and banned heroin outright. Before that, even a child could walk into a pharmacy and buy heroin in measured doses, and there was virtually no associated societal problem to speak of. The next drug nationally prohibited was alcohol, which was constitutionally possible thanks to the 18^th Amendment, after many decades of agitation by social reformers, progressives, puritans, and others who incredibly believed they could eliminate sin through the state’s salvation. Throughout the 1920s the Noble Experiment only proved that neither human nature nor economic law could be overturned by federal legislation. Violent crime skyrocketed. The prison population doubled. Almost half the law enforcement apparatus became dedicated to stamping out liquor. Police departments became even more corrupt than usual. Hundreds of federal officials were fired over bribery and misconduct. By the end of the decade even some former abolitionists saw that prohibition was destroying the country and worked to end it through the 21^st Amendment. 
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