their patients without a “legitimate” medical purpose, thus ending legal, recreational drug use. Still, even after the Harrison Act of 1914 drugs were seen as a primarily medical problem. Over time, the perception of drugs changed from objects of medical addiction to articles of immorality, until they were seen primarily as a “criminal” problem in the 1930’s (Vallance 5). Much of this may have resulted from alcohol Prohibition, which accustomed the American public to substance regulation. At the same time, the typical drug user changed. Before 1914, the average user was typified by the heroin addict Mrs. Dubose in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird: white, middle-class, middle-aged, and female. David Courtwright notes that “although fictitious, Mrs. Dubose personifies the American addict of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…her sex, age of addiction, race, nationality, region, class, and occupation…[are] typical” (qtd. in Trebach 56). As increasingly large numbers of males, minorities, and the poor began using drugs, people’s attitudes towards drugs changed. Duster notes that “middle America’s moral hostility comes faster and easier when directed toward a young, lower-class Negro male, than toward a middle-aged, middle-class white female” (21). Indeed, even drug law crusader James Inciardi concedes that many early drug laws gained support because of racism and xenophobia (Trebach 47). Thus, a demographic shift in drug use exacerbated the sociopolitical shift towards treating drugs as immoral. Today, the “immorality” of drug use is widely accepted: Drugs are as vilified today as Demon Rum was before alcohol Prohibition. Some examples of this are former First Lady Nancy Reagan’s assertion that “Any user of illict drugs is an accomplice to murder” and former Drug Czar William Bennett’s s...
