When President Richard Nixon declared his war on illegal drugs in 1972, many people questioned if it was just lip service to promote his re-election that year, or if indeed it was that serious of an issue to make it part of his platform. Not only was drug addiction a growing problem, but so were the crimes related to it, hence Nixon’s adamant focus on the issue.

However, drug addiction was by no means some new societal concept that just reared its ugly head overnight.The first documentations of drug addiction in the United States date back to the opium dens of the “Wild West” and the excessive use of Morphine to treat the wounded during the Civil War. What resulted was that so many Union soldiers became addicted to morphine that by 1880, the addiction was commonly called the “Soldier’s Disease.” Supposedly, the South was considered poor and this became the chief reason that morphine addiction was so prevalent among Union soldiers versus Confederate ones.

By the turn of the century (1900), it was estimated that nearly 5% of the adult population in the US suffered from some kind of substance abuse addiction, the predominant demographic being a rural-living, white female, not minority, inner-city males as is often the misconception. The scarcity of medicine and the traveling salesman attributed the most to morphine addiction among rural, Caucasian females. There were balms, elixirs, and oils that were considered “patent medicines”, and once they came under scrutiny and testing, it was discovered that they contained up to 50% morphine.

During the 20th century, the problem became even more compounded due to factors such as availability, biochemical advancements, and a significant increase in written prescriptions by medical personnel. The introduction of synthetic drugs, specifically LSD, methamphetamine, and others didn’t help the situation either.

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