China's population was 400M in 1900.* That's an addiction rate of 22.5%. Drugs were also legal in the US in 1900. The DEA sez the addiction rate to either opium or cocaine was 0.5%:
By 1900, about one American in 200 was either a cocaine or opium addict.
http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/demand/speakout/06so.htm
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Fast forward to 2000:
...the Office of National Drug Control Policy pegs the current number of cocaine addicts at around 3.6 million people.
http://www.thecyn.com/cocaine-rehab/cocaine-addiction-united-states.html
"For example, numbers like heroin addiction. You can find numbers that go from 255,000 up to the one I'm currently using, 980,000, if I remember the last time we updated it, and those are all valid scientific studies." --Drug Czar Mcaffrey
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/symposium/panelmccaffrey.html
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Adding the ONDCP numbers for cocaine and heroin addiction together yields an addiction rate of about 1.5%. So after a century of increasingly aggressive prohibition, our own government is telling us that addiction has gone from 0.5% in 1900 to 1.5% in 2000. Which historical example is more relevant to the US in 2012, Chinese history from 1900 or American history from 1900?
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* http://www.populstat.info/
Not sure why or how you are trying to twist this. Bottom line, China went from very low addiction to very high addiction between the time Britain started importing opium and the time it stopped. On the other hand, We nipped it in the bud back around 1900 and as a result of the war on drugs, our addiction rate is still only 1.5%, and that's by YOUR numbers.
You are simply re-proving the same point I am making. The war on drugs is a HUGE success, because we didn't end up with 20% of our population addicted to drugs.