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We stopped it before it got that bad by outlawing these drugs.

"Many soldiers on both sides of the Civil War who were given morphine for their wounds became addicted to it, and this increased level of addiction continued throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In 1880, many drugs, including opium and cocaine, were legal — and, like some drugs today, seen as benign medicine not requiring a doctor’s care and oversight. Addiction skyrocketed. There were over 400,000 opium addicts in the U.S. That is twice as many per capita as there are today.

"By 1900, about one American in 200 was either a cocaine or opium addict."

So we had 400,000 opium addicts in 1880, many of whom were addicted Civil War veterans. The population of the US in 1880 was around 50M. That works out to an addiction rate of 0.8% in 1880. Now, in 1900 the addiction rate to either opium or cocaine was 1 in 200. That is an addiction rate of 0.5%.

So in 1880 there were 0.8% addicted to just opium vs 0.5% to either opium or cocaine in 1900. The DEA is telling us that addiction declined substantially between 1880 and 1900, despite these drugs being legal.

So now you are accepting the 400,000 number? 45,000 or 400,000, it's still a lot of people with which to kickstart an addiction epidemic.

Your argument here is that because addiction rate declined in this period, this demonstrates that there would have been no runaway addiction problem?

There are several problems with drawing solid conclusions from these statistics. Firstly, I don't know how the DEA would know what sort of addiction rates they were suffering in 1900 because I don't know how they would have accurately polled all the drug users of that time period. Obviously they are relying on some sort of proxy factor to determine this, or they are merely putting forth some sort of wild @$$ed guess.

Wikipedia has this to say on the subject.

Opium usage had begun to decline by 1914 after rising dramatically in the post Civil War Era, peaking at around one-half million pounds per year in 1896

Secondly, you ignore that addiction can decline when addicted people die off, which they tend to do, especially if they are addicted to something like morphine or heroin. Perhaps the decline in addiction (if there was one) was due to the deaths of the addicts?

I do recall reading that societal opposition to drug usage was increasing in the 1890s and 1900s. I believe the first efforts by doctors to study the problem came about in the 1890s.