The debate over whether or not cocaine is addictive is ongoing and complicated. The majority of mental health professionals take the view that regular cocaine users cannot voluntarily stop taking the drug. In this sense, cocaine meets the definition of an addictive drug. Moreover, these experts believe that cocaine use leads to physical changes [...]

After more than two decades of relative obscurity, cocaine re-emerged on the American drug scene in the early 1970s. Deterred by the obvious addictiveness and social stigma of drugs like heroin and the occasional “bad trip” associated with hallucinogens such as LSD, some Americans saw cocaine as a relatively harmless “recreational” drug. Its potential for [...]

Although not all long-term cocaine users experience cocaine psychosis, those who do are unable to function in society. Thus, cocaine psychosis is likely to affect those personally and professionally connected to the user as well as the user himself. Those suffering from cocaine psychosis display a variety of antisocial behaviors, such as [...]

As destructive as crack is to the addict’s family, the drug is even more destructive to the health of the addict. Medical complications resulting from long-term crack use show up daily in emergency rooms across America. Cardiac arrest, strokes, and liver failure are all well-documented results of crack use. In addition to illness and [...]

Fear of cannabis, or marihuana, as it was beginning to be known, was minimal throughout most of the nation in the 1920s. Nevertheless it still concerned the federal government. For example, in the January 1929 authorization of the two narcotic centers for the treatment of addicted federal prisoners, the law specifically defined “habit-forming narcotic drugs” [...]

During its first few years, the bureau, as judged from its annual reports, minimized the marihuana problem and felt that control should be vested in the state governments.24 The report published in 1932 commented, This abuse of the drug is noted among the Latin-American or Spanish-speaking population. The sale of cannabis cigarettes occurs to a [...]

Anslinger went to New York in January 1936 to meet with a group of distinguished experts to try to hammer out a marihuana control bill; present were a representative of the Foreign Policy Association; Joseph Chamberlain, professor of law at Columbia; Herbert L. May, member of the Permanent Central [opium] Board of the League of [...]

Believing that the movement to control narcotics was gaining strength and that some legislation was likely to be enacted, the American Pharmaceutical Association sought to give the various components of the drug trades a united voice, or at least a forum, in which the interests of each would receive the maximum possible support of the [...]

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century United States, the production and misuse of methamphetamine was a growing and urgent public health, criminal justice, and child welfare problem affecting [...]

In posts of this site, we begin with an introductory discussion of the history and epidemiology of methamphetamine. Despite intense publicity in the popular press in the 1990s and early 2000s, methamphetamine was not a new drug, nor were problems with its misuse. Methamphetamine was synthesized more than 100 years ago by a German chemist [...]