Drugs Mopho. History of the War on Drugs - War on Drugs History and Timeline. At the turn of the 20th century, the drug market went mostly unregulated. Medical remedies, which often contained cocaine or heroin derivatives, were freely distributed without prescription--and without much consumer awareness of which drugs were potent and which were not. A caveat emptor attitude towards medical tonics could have meant the difference between life and death. 1914: The Opening Salvo Public domain. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress. The Supreme Court ruled in 1886 that state governments could not regulate interstate commerce--and the federal government, whose skimpy law enforcement focused mainly on counterfeiting and other crimes against the state, initially did very little to pick up the slack. This changed during the early years of the 20th century, as the invention of automobiles made interstate crime--and investigation of interstate crime--more practicable. 1937: Reefer Madness 1954: Eisenhower's New War Public domain.
General Dwight D. Not that it did so alone. Timeline: America's War on Drugs. Welcome. Since it first went online in 1998, Drug War Facts provides reliable information with applicable citations on important public health and criminal justice issues. It is updated continuously by its current Editor, Doug McVay. Most charts, facts and figures are from government sources, government-sponsored sources, peer reviewed journals and occasionally newspapers. In all cases the source is cited so that journalists, scholars and students can verify, check context and obtain additional information. Our mission is to offer useful facts, cited from authoritative sources, to a debate that is often characterized by myths, error, emotion and dissembling.
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Nixon's 'war on drugs' began 40 years ago, and the battle is still raging | Society | The Observer. Four decades ago, on 17 July 1971, President Richard Nixon declared what has come to be called the "war on drugs". Nixon told Congress that drug addiction had "assumed the dimensions of a national emergency", and asked Capitol Hill for an initial $84m (£52m) for "emergency measures". Drug abuse, said the president, was "public enemy number one". But as reported the following morning in our sister newspaper, the Guardian, the president's initiative appears to have been primarily motivated not by considerations of the ghettoes or Woodstock festival, but by addiction among soldiers fighting in Vietnam: the first and immediate measure in the "war on drugs", implemented 40 years ago this weekend, was the institution of urine testing for all US troops in Indochina.
The Guardian's "sidebar" story to the news bulletin was not from Chicago or Los Angeles but the Mekong Delta, with soldiers laughing: "You can go anywhere, ask anyone, they'll get it for you.