I took your suggestion. Here's what the usdoj website says:
_________________________________________
"By 1900, about one American in 200 was either a cocaine or opium addict." [that's 0.5% - ken]
--http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/demand/speakout/06so.htm
__________________________________________
"There were an estimated 980,000 hardcore heroin addicts in the United States in 1999, 50 percent more than the estimated 630,000 hardcore addicts in 1992."
http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs07/794/heroin.htm
______________________________________
"Among those using cocaine in the United States during 2000, 3.6 million were hardcore users who spent more than $36 billion on the drug in that year."
--http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs07/794/cocaine.htm
______________________________________
The US population in 2000 was about 280,000,000. So the combined addiction rate was about 1.6% in 2000 vs 0.5% in 1900.
No you didn't.
There is absolutely nothing there about the problem the Brits had as a result of their widespread opium addictions, and what happened to India as a result of the Brits expanding opium production there.
All you "proved" with your hasty number gathering was prove what i said about Cocaine in the early days. Not too many people knew about it.
But, after it became illegal, and despite the explosion of it's popularity, the "war on drugs" managed to keep it's use under control, unlike what it would have been like if it were legal, which would be as widespead as opium use was in the UK in 1800 through to 1900.
By the middle of the nineteenth century hundreds of opium based potions, pill, and patent medicines were available to the general public. Among the most famous preparations were Dover’s Powders, initially marketed as a cure for gout; Godfey’s Cordial which was sold as a “soother” for crying babies; and laudanum, a tincture of opium in alcohol, which was both easily made and readily available.
It was epidemic. Even worse was what it did to India.
"In a report in the New York Times of March 29 1896 the following graphic description of an opium den in Lucknow was given: “you will find yourself in a spacious but very dirty courtyard, around which are ranged fifteen or twenty small rooms. This is the establishment of the Government collector -the opium farmer. The stench is sickening, and the swarm of flies intolerable. Enter one of the small rooms. It has no windows and is very dark, but in the centre is a small charcoal fire, the glow of which lights up the faces of nine or ten human beings - men and women - lying on the floor like pigs in a sty. A young girl fans the fire, lights the opium pipe, and holds it to the mouth of the last comer till his head falls heavily on the body of the inert man or woman who happens to lie near him. In no groggery, in no lunatic or idiot asylum, will one see such utter, helpless depravity as appears in the countenances of those in the preliminary stages of opium drunkenness” (Schaffer, par. 6) The reporter suggests that up to 14,000 people in Lucknow alone were “abject slaves of this hideous vice.” This report suggests that to the late nineteenth century mind the image of opium was very much entangled with concepts of the Orient, of deviance, and sexual licentiousness in an Eastern context - a very different image of the drug than the pharmaceutical panacea it was seen as earlier in the century."
http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofEnglish/imperial/india/opium.htm