Poppycock. Drugs/alcohol had been around *long* before the 60s.
It's humorous however to watch some try and blame ever thing happening today, including millions entering our country illegally, while government looks the other way, hundreds of thousand of murdering gang members, many here illegally, daily drive-by shootings, school and work place massacres, now religious fanatics that want to murder us all, etc, and blame it all on the 1960s.
That's laughable.
You '60s-apologists in denial that the '60s was the WATERSHED of everything crappy - and rationalizing and equivalencing other ages w/anecdotal incidents representing maybe 5% of the culture rather than say 45% - are laughable. ;-)
Alchohol was pervasive in the culture before the 60s, but other drugs were not -- except among illegal aliens and the Hollywood and NYC elites. I can remember the shock waves in my home town when a market near my high school was closed down because of marijuana sales. The customers were Mexican migrants, and use of that drug was definately considered a low class pastime.
Heroin was around in the criminal classes and the avant guard in New York, (perhaps New Orleans) but it barely touched the rest of the country and definitely had a very bad reputation.
The first time I EVER saw someone "drugged out" was on the street in Berkeley in 1963. I already had two children. My husband was appalled and set about moving us from the neighborhood within a month! It really was something new for our community, but it was running rampant within a year with drugs being freely passed around and tried at grad school parties.
Please give me the post where someone said that drugs/alcohol had not been around before the 60s.
You either purposely created a strawman that you could defeat, you are missing the clear cut historical point even admitted to by those who participated, or you are simply ignorant and are not aware of what the goals of the 1960s counter-culture were, and what they achieved.
I was alive long before the 1960s and I know the damage that was done, on purpose, and the results from this damage that we still live with today, including the current culture war. The Culture WAR you see today is simply a continuation of the one the left proliferated in the 1960s with all their might and with every lie they could muster.
A very, very small minority of adults used the crutch of recreational drugs before the 1960s, very few children even knew what they were. Drunkeness has always been around and has destroyed many (was long known to be a great cause of poverty, exchanging paychecks for alcohol instead of children's food, shelter and clothing), that being said, few adults used anything but alcohol before the 1960s but being a drunk was never something to be proud of; the 1960s counter-culture worked hard to destigmatize being a druggie or a drunkard.