The Origins of the War on Drugs

For a time, things like marawana or cocaine, or opiates were legal. Now those same sorts of substances can lead to draconian prison sentences and things like man tory minimum. The fear that what are these yellow men, these chinamen, going to do to our precious white women, aluring them into opium addiction and turning them into sex slaves in our opium dens? Same thing with cocaine, right? Cocaine widely used. And then the first prohibitions come about, not because there's new evidence of their harms. I mean, that plays a small role. It's more about because the public perceptions of who uses, or who is perceived to use, these substances.