ABSTRACT
Introduction In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed a ve-member Cabinet-level committee and directed them to “stamp out narcotic addiction.” Although many drugs-opiates and cocaine among them-had enjoyed a certain respectability and were widely used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by the time of the Great Depression all of today’s illegal drugs had been outlawed and lost their social acceptability. In a nation preoccupied rst by economic crisis and then by a world war, drug use dropped out of the mainstream and nearly disappeared.
