Prohibition of cocaine
In the United States, cocaine was prohibited in the first part of the 20th century. Newspapers used terms like "Negro Cocaine Fiends" and "Cocainized Niggers" to drive up sales, causing a nationwide panic about the rape of white women by black men, high on cocaine. Many police forces changed from a .32 caliber to a .38 caliber pistol because the smaller gun was supposedly unable to kill black men.[2][not in citation given][unreliable source?]
The Harrison Act
This was followed by the Harrison Act, passed in 1914, which required sellers of opiates and cocaine to get a license (which were usually only distributed to white people)[citation needed]. While originally intended to require paper trails of drug transactions[citation needed] between doctors, drug stores, and patients, it soon became a prohibitive law. The law’s wording was quite vague; it was originally intended as a revenue tracking mechanism that required prescriptions for opiates. It became legal precedent that any prescription for a narcotic given by a physician or pharmacist – even in the course of medical treatment for addiction - constituted conspiracy to violate the Harrison Act. In 1919, the Supreme Court ruled in Doremus that the Harrison Act was constitutional and in Webb that physicians could not prescribe narcotics solely for maintenance.[5] In the decision Jin Fuey Moy v. United States, 254 U.S. 189 (1920) the court upheld that it was a violation of the Harrison Act even if a physician provided prescription of a narcotic for an addict, and thus subject to criminal prosecution. The initial proponents of the Harrison Act did not support blanket prohibition of the drugs involved 1. This is also true of the later Marijuana Tax Act in 1937. Soon, however, licensing bodies did not issues licenses, effectively banning the drugs.
The American judicial system did not initially accept drug prohibition. Prosecutors argued that possessing drugs was a tax violation, as no legal licenses to sell drugs were in existence; hence, a person possessing drugs must have purchased them from an unlicensed source. After some wrangling, this was accepted as federal jurisdiction under the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution.
