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 of the century in drugstores and by mail-order catalogs and traveling salesmen.
Cocaine first became popular in America in the late 19th century. Parke- Davis, the U.S. pharmaceutical company, sold at least 15 products with cocaine, including cigarettes, cheroots, and coca skin salve and face powder. At the time an estimated 1 in 400 Americans used opiates regularly.
But as drug abuse and addiction abounded, the inevitable backlash set in, with a decidedly racist and xenophobic tinge. A 1910 federal survey reported that "cocaine is often the 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 states and Congress passed laws regulating the sale and use of cocaine and opiates; the U.S. banned the import of opium in 1909. By the 1920s, public revulsion against drugs verged on the hysterical. "Drug addiction is more communicable and less curable than leprosy," declared Antidrug Crusader Richmond Hobson in a national radio address in 1928.
So ended the first drug crisis in the U.S. In less than a generation, public attitudes had been transformed. Once widely regarded as a harmless cure-all, cocaine "had become in the American mind the most hated, feared and loathed drug," says Dr. David Musto of Yale, a leading authority on the history of drugs and society.