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"There's just something in the American psyche that demands that drug users be punished instead of treated and rehabilitated."

'Puritan heritage.'

More like 'increasing influence of statist control freaks', acting as 'health Nazis'. From H.L Mencken's obituary of a "latter day Puritan" who was utterly opposed to, as Mencken calls it, "the Prohibition imbecility":

http://www.freebooks.com/docs/html/gncf/appendix_a.htm

In his own position there was never the least shadow of inconsistency. When the Prohibition imbecility fell upon the country, and a multitude of theological quacks, including not a few eminent Presbyterians, sought to read support for it into the New Testament, he attacked them with great vigor, and routed them easily. He not only proved that there was nothing in the teachings of Jesus to support so monstrous a folly; he proved abundantly that the known teachings of Jesus were unalterably against it. And having set forth that proof, he refused, as a convinced and honest Christian, to have anything to do with the dry jehad.

This rebellion against a craze that now seems so incredible and so far away was not the chief cause of his break with his ecclesiastical superiors, but it was probably responsible for a large part of their extraordinary dudgeon against him. The Presbyterian Church, like the other evangelical churches, was taken for a dizzy ride by Prohibition. Led into the heresy by fanatics of low mental visibility, it presently found itself cheek by jowl with all sorts of criminals, and fast losing the respect of sensible people. Its bigwigs thus became extremely jumpy on the subject, and resented bitterly every exposure of their lamentable folly.

In the process of being added to the "verboten substances":
tobacco.

http://www.thirdmill.org/answers/answer.asp/file/99989.qna/category/pt/page/questions/site/iiim

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/webpages54/ap/CigarSmoking.html

http://www.amazon.com/Health-Benefits-Tobacco-Smokers-Paradox/dp/9962636434