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The opium poppy was first cultivated more than 5,000 years ago and was used by the Persians, Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians, Users discovered the bliss that could be achieved by smoking the extract derived from crushing the seed pods, yielding a pleasurable, peaceful feeling throughout the body. Use of Hul Gil or the plant of joy grew quickly around the fertile crescent. The ancient Greeks knew and understood the problem of drug use. At the time of the Crusades, the Arabs were using marijuana. In the Western hemisphere, natives of Mexico and South America chewed coca leaves and used magic mushrooms in their religious ceremonies. Drug use was also accepted in Europe well into the twentieth century. Recently uncovered pharmacy records circa 1900 to 1920 showed sales of cocaine and heroin solutions to members of the British royal family; records from 1912 show that Winston Churchill, then a member of Parliament, was sold a cocaine solution while staying in Scotland.
In the early years of the United States, opium and its derivatives were easily obtained. Opium-based drugs were used in various patented medicine cure-alls. Morphine was used extensively to relieve the pain of wounded soldiers in the Civil War. By the turn of the century, an estimated 1 million U.S. citizens were opiate users.
Several factors precipitated the current stringent U.S. drug laws. The rural religious creeds of the nineteenth centuryespecially those of the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptistsemphasized individual human toil and self-sufficiency while designating the use of intoxicating substances as an unwholesome surrender to the evils of urban morality. Religious leaders were thoroughly opposed to the use and sale of narcotics. The medical literature of the late 1800s began to designate the use of morphine and opium as a vice, a habit, an appetite, and a disease. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century police literature described drug users as habitual criminals. Moral crusaders in the nineteenth century defined drug use as evil and directed that local and national entities should outlaw the sale and possession of drugs. Some well-publicized research efforts categorized drug use as highly dangerous. Drug use was also associated with the foreign immigrants recruited to work in factories and mines; they brought with them their national drug habits. Early antidrug legislation appears to be tied to prejudice against immigrating ethnic minorities.
After the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States inherited Spain's opium monopoly in the Philippines. Concern over this international situation, along with the domestic issues just outlined, led the U.S. government to participate in the First International Drug Conference, held in Shanghai in 1908, and a second one at The Hague in 1912 . Participants in these two conferences were asked to strongly oppose free trade in drugs. The international pressure, coupled with a growing national concern, led to the passage of the antidrug laws discussed here.
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