Why Drugs are Illegal Nowadays & Hero Quiz ; )

DRUGS 100 YEARS AGO

The foreword to the script for Human Wreckage, written in 1923, declared that habit-forming drugs were the gravest menace
confronting America:

"Its victims, numbering hundreds of thousands, are scattered throughout the length and breadth of the land.
They range from children to old men and women
and embrace the entire social scale from the dock laborer to
the bank president. Every profession, every walk of life, has
contributed its quota to Dope and the sacrifice continues daily.

"Immense quantities of morphine, heroin and cocaine are yearly smuggled
into America across the Canadian and Mexican borders. The dope traffic
has grown alarmingly within the past ten years and is now of gigantic
proportions."

In 1900, if you wanted a stimulant or a painkiller, you simply went to
your corner druggist and bought opium or its derivative, morphine; the
cost was a few pennies.  During the Civil War, injured soldiers
had been
given morphine and found it so effective they continued using it after
the war, recommending it to friends and relatives.  Addiction spread so
rapidly it became known as "the American problem."
Yet if you, like one
out of every 400 Americans,  became an addict, few people noticed
because your supply route was assured. You were no more of a social
outcast than is a diabetic today.

No laws banned the sale of narcotics, and few people objected to their
use on moral grounds. Opium joints were the object of curiosity and
opprobrium because the dens were operated by the Chinese and the whole
thing was so thoroughly unAmerican; nevertheless, tour guides included
them in their itineraries, and several films were made about them,
including Chinese Opium Den (1894), a Kinetoscope loop, and Rube in an
Opium Joint, made for the Mutoscope in 1905, which showed a slumming
tour visiting a Chinatown den. (Indeed, many were operated purely for
tourists.) For patent medicine manufacturers (the largest single user of
newspaper advertising space), addictive drugs were ideal ingredients, as
they ensured that customers returned for more. It was only when
muckraking journalists began to reveal, in 1904, that infants were being
stunted or killed by the opium in patent medicines that some states
passed laws to curb its distribution.

In 1898, a German researcher had produced a wonderful new substance
called heroin from a morphine base. It was introduced under that name as
a cough suppressant by Bayer & Company. Everyone believed it was
nonaddictive, and it was even used to cure morphine addiction.  Doctors
prescribed it for birth pains (the mother in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s
Journey into Night becomes addicted in this way). Not for years were its
addictive properties suspected.

Coca-Cola, whose formula involved the use of both the coca leaf (source
of cocaine) and the cola nut (which contains caffeine), was introduced
in Georgia in 1886 as a headache remedy. In 1906, after the passage of
the first Pure Food and Drug Act, the federal government investigated
Coca-Cola; the manufacturers faced criminal charges for adulteration and
misbranding.’ The company eventually managed to outmaneuver the Supreme
Court, and it was never proven that Coca-Cola contained cocaine. But if
it had, it would not have stood alone. In 1909, thirty-nine soft drinks,
available to children, were laced with the drug.

And the case gave rise to one of the first films to show the danger of
the drugs, D. W. Griffith’s For His Son (Biograph, 1912): "A physician,
through his love for his only son, whom he desires to see wealthy, is
tempted to sacrifice his honor by concocting a soft drink containing
cocaine, knowing how rapid and powerful is the hold obtained by
cocaine…. The drink meets with tremendous success … but his son
cultivates a liking for it. The father discovers his son’s weakness too
late, for he soon becomes a hopeless victim of the drug."’

Griffith and author Emmett Campbell Hall called the drink Dopokoke and
gave it the slogan "For That Tired Feeling." The son (Charles West)
eventually dies and the plight of the father (Charles Hill Mailes) is
summed up in the closing title: "He did not care whom he victimized
until he found the result of dishonor at his own door."

***

The drug-film cycle came to an end about this time, when, with America
at war. Such critical subjects were felt to be unpatriotic. In 1918,
narcotics clinics were opened to ensure addicts a steady supply under
medical supervision and to wipe out drug peddling. In New York, on some
days, the lines of addicts extended for several city blocks. Newspapers
wrote sensational reports, public opinion was outraged, and the moral
police rose up to seal the doom of the clinics.

In December 1914, President Woodrow Wilson had signed the Harrison
Narcotic Act, which specified that everyone involved in narcotic
transactions, except the customers, had to register with the government.
In 1919, a Supreme Court decision exploded like a time bomb, revealing
an aspect of the act few had taken seriously: the provision that
unregistered persons could purchase drugs only upon a doctor’s
prescription and that that prescription had to be for legitimate medical
use. The provision destroyed what peace of mind remained to most
addicts, among whom were many casualties of war.

"As a direct consequence of [the act], the medical profession abandoned
the drug addict," wrote Troy Duster.35 Doctors who continued to
prescribe were arrested, prosecuted, fined, or imprisoned. The addict,
isolated from legal sources was forced to turn to the underworld.

The same year, the Volstead Act outlawed drugs as well as alcohol. The
narcotics clinics were closed between 1920 and 1922, and the number of
arrests for narcotic offenses rose from 888 in 1918 to 10,297 in 1925. 
In 1922, the Jones-Miller Act established a Narcotics Control Board and
a five-year sentence for pushers. And such drug films as reached the
public screens were invariably condemned for "educating" an innocent
public. Heroin, easily prepared and transported, leaped into prominence
on the black market. By 1929, it was estimated there were between  1 and
4 million addicts consuming $5 million worth of drugs annually."

 

 

Which action hero are you?
[Inmate is]  Indiana Jones!

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Indiana Jones is an archaeologist/adventurer with an unquenchable love for danger and excitement. He travels the globe in search of historical relics. He loves travel, excitement, and a good archaeological discovery. He hates Nazis and snakes, perhaps to the same degree. He always brings along his trusty whip and fedora. He’s tough, cool, and dedicated. He relies on both brains and brawn to get him out of trouble and into it.

 

Indiana Jones

 

92%

Lara Croft

 

75%

Captain Jack Sparrow

 

75%

The Terminator

 

71%

James Bond, Agent 007

 

63%

Batman, the Dark Knight

 

63%

Neo, the "One"

 

58%

The Amazing Spider-Man

 

54%

El Zorro

 

50%

Maximus

 

46%

William Wallace

 

38%

Take this quiz here:   http://quizfarm.com/test.php?q_id=92013