Your own personal experience is not randomly selected from the population at large, so can't be validly extrapolated to the population at large.
The "decline" if there was any, is just statistical noise.
Oh, yes? What standard errors did you calculate for those numbers, and how did you calculate them?
One does not have to calculate
So you were talking out your @$$ - got it.
A point that you seemingly haven't grasped is that there is no good hard data from which to calculate anything. As I have mentioned, it is easy to see how you can figure out how many Civil War Vets had been given drugs, but it is virtually impossible to determine how many people in 1900 were using or not using drugs.
The best you can do is use the proxy of drug quantities being imported to give a "best guess" estimate of what usage was, and there is no way to quantify what level of error you will get with that method.
Capiche?
So you were talking out your @$$ - got it.
No more so than you. For whatever reason you seem to think you can get hard answers from speculative claims from people who have no way of knowing the truth of what they are claiming.
Again, there were records of how many people received drugs from Civil War wounds. But knowing that usage declined by some amount in 1900 is d@mn near impossible. That can only be a guess.