Show Write Your Congressman Prepared by the Staff of the National Coordinating Council on Drug Education HISTORY OF DRUGS X As we stated in our last column about the history of the widespread consumption of patent and the dangers of opium addiction had he-come serious problems in the United Several characteristics of opiate use under nineteen th-century conditions when opiate preparations were legally available at low cost will probably strike readers as most users of narcotics in those days were women By estimates during the indicated that male-users outnumbered females by at least five to A second remarkable fact about the nineteenth-century use of opiates in the United States was the age of the A survey done in Chicago in 1880 showed an average age for males of years and for females of in nearly half of all addict known to the Federal of Narcotics and Drugs are 30 and younger and only percent over 10 years of A third interesting fact was the socioeconomic status of the nineteenth-century narcotics A survey done in 1885 in Iowa noted that the majority of opiate to be found among the educated and most honored and useful of there is no evidence of any disproportionate use of opiates among black-people during the there are few references to their use of opiates at |