How on earth could one possibly do such a retrospective anyhow.
The biggest incarceration contributor in the US today is drug related crime. Lots of losers may have been getting zonked on opium and morphine from their chemists in the late 1800s but hardly anyone was going to jail on account of it. Certainly nobody stole to keep their habit up or slew rival dealers. But that’s when Christian faith counted for a lot more publicly as well and getting zonked would have gotten severe public disapproval. It just wasn’t done or accepted, any more than crapping in public was. The supposedly more humane ban gave rise to many very inhumane consequences.
I agree. The fact that the industrial revolution and the incredible amount of scientific/intellectual progress in the late 19th/early 20th century occured at a time when you could purchase morphine sulphate by the ounce is a reasonable argument against modern anti-drug hysteria.
In some places it was standard medical practice to purposely get alcoholics hooked on opium as a substitute because the health/psychological/daily functioning consequences are far less severe.
Its ironic that all the really serious negative health and societal consequences of heroin addiction in modern are the direct result of making opium illegal.
Opium paste/laudanum etc. is fairly bulky so it must be concentrated into heroin for smuggling, then adulterated and cut by street dealers for redistribution, which leads straight to IV drug use, needle sharing and the infectious disease horror-show that follows.
I’m not for blanket legalization of everything, but we could do a lot better than we’re doing now by moderating our policies.