[pm90]

Part of the problem is that alcohol and cocaine were perhaps the only substances which were well known to cause addiction and were easy to create and society tended to deal with them by prohibition in some form (cocaine was forbidden, alcohol is forbidden by some religions etc). And when you had all these new substances burst forth it was natural to try and restrict them.

We know now that isn't the best strategy to deal with it and we should act accordingly.

[code_duck]

What do you mean exactly? Opiates have been known and used widely for a lot longer than cocaine, and so has cannabis as a drug, and Asia at least. Opium it was known throughout the old world and ancient and medieval times, but cocaine certainly wasn't. I think the Greeks commented on it's addictive properties. There is medieval and ancient commentary on hashish eaters (the word assassin is said to come from a clan of hash-addicted killers). Amanita mushrooms have a long history of use by humans, as do psilocybin mushrooms. Also, tobacco and coffee have been used and abused for centuries or millenia.

At various times, many societies have tried to deal with addictive substances by prohibition and harsh punishments. For instance, when tobacco was first introduced to Spain, it was seen as a horrible thing that definitely had something to do with Satan, and possession became punishable by death. That didn't stop people from using it and becoming addicted.

Balzac is famed to have been insanely addicted to coffee, drinking it in the form of a thick sludge that he said he required to be creative and productive.

Another example were the Opium Wars. Part of the issue was concerned about use of opiates in China. For example this quote from Wikipedia about the First Opium War:

"The influx of narcotics reversed the Chinese trade surplus, drained the economy of silver, and increased the numbers of opium addicts inside the country, outcomes that worried Chinese officials.

In 1839 the Daoguang Emperor, rejecting proposals to legalise and tax opium, appointed viceroy Lin Zexu to solve the problem by completely banning the opium trade (it had already been illegal to smoke and sell certain forms of opium in China since 1729)."