History of Legal and Illegal Drugs from 1875 to 1900 A.D.

About the history of legal and illegal drugs from 1875 to 1900 A.D. in particular the temperance movement, Freud does cocaine, Johns Hopkins founded, heroin created.

A Synoptic History of the Promotion and Prohibition of Drugs

1882 The 1st law in the U.S., and in the world, making "temperance education" a part of the required course in public schools is enacted. In 1886, Congress makes such education mandatory in the District of Columbia, and in territorial, military, and naval schools. By 1900, all the States have similar laws.

1882 The Personal Liberty League of the U.S. is founded to oppose the increasing momentum of movements for compulsory abstinence from alcohol.

1883 Dr. Theodor Aschenbrandt, a German army physician, secures a supply of pure cocaine from the pharmaceutical firm of Merck, issues it to Bavarian soldiers during their maneuvers, and reports on the beneficial effects of the drug in increasing the soldiers' ability to endure fatigue.

1884 Sigmund Freud treats his depression with cocaine, and reports feeling "exhilaration and lasting euphoria, which in no way differs from the normal euphoria of the healthy person. . . . You perceive an increase in self-control and possess more vitality and capacity for work. . . . In other words, you are simply more normal, and it is soon hard to believe that you are under the influence of any drug."

1884 Laws are enacted to make antialcohol teaching compulsory in public schools in New York State. The following year similar laws are passed in Pennsylvania, with other States soon following suit.

1885 The Report of the Royal Commission on Opium concludes that opium is more like the Westerner's liquor than a substance to be feared and abhorred.

1889 The Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, Md., is opened. One of its world-famous founders, Dr. William Stewart Halsted, is a morphine addict. He continues to use morphine in large doses throughout a phenomenally successful surgical career lasting until his death in 1922.

1894 The Report of the Indian Hemp Drug Commission, running to over 3,000 pages in 7 volumes, is published. This inquiry, commissioned by the British Government, concludes: "There is no evidence of any weight regarding the mental and moral injuries from the moderate use of these drugs. . . . Moderation does not lead to excess in hemp any more than it does in alcohol. Regular, moderate use of ganja or bhang produces the same effects as moderate and regular doses of whiskey." The commission's proposal to tax bhang is never put into effect, in part, perhaps, because one of the commissioners, an Indian, cautions that Muslim law and Hindu custom forbid "taxing anything that gives pleasure to the poor."

1894 Norman Kerr, an English physician and president of the British Society for the Study of Inebriety, declares: "Drunkenness has generally been regarded as . . . a sin, a vice, or a crime. . . . [But] there is now a consensus of intelligent opinion that habitual and periodic drunkenness is often either a symptom or a sequel of disease considered as one of a group of nervous affections. . . . The victim can no more resist [alcohol] than a man with ague can resist shivering."

1898 Diacetylmorphine (heroin) is synthesized in Germany. It is widely lauded as a "safe preparation free from addiction-forming properties."

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