Health Article Forum-Discussion about health care and Health article in Health Article Forum

im guessing the early 60's but i could be wrong.

To be precise, there really was never a time without recreational drug use.  Beer and rum were common from the very earliest colonial days in America.  Some of the earliest recorded Puritan sermons were on the evils of drunkenness.  Alcohol is no less a recreational drug than pot is, right?Alcohol continued to be the mainstay drug of choice for a long time, but Native Americans used pot (although whether one could accurately call smoking pot or eating peyote as recreational use is doubtful.  Those uses were mostly ritual).  The immigration of many Chinese in the 1840's and onward brought opium smoking into the country, and this practice jumped to the other ethnic groups fairly quickly.  Keep in mind, too, the opiates were already in use in patent medicines throughout white America, and slaves often used pot, as well.By the early 1920's, marijuana use among black and hispanic groups was on the rise, and had jumped the racial barrier to whites.  By the 1930's, during prohibition, marijuana use was so prevalent among white teens that the movie "reefer madness" was made to warn of its dangers.The 1940's saw a reduction of pot use, perhaps, but high alcohol use, and the 1950's saw the rise of the beatniks, and the rise then of marijuana use among white, middle class kids.  While the later 1960's and early 1970's certainly saw a rise in recreational drug use and the popularization of such activities, you can clearly see that recreational drugs have been with us in America from very early on.