You are missing the reality. It was massively widespread. The point was certain drugs were banned to target certain groups despite other forms of the drugs not being banned, and other drug users never being arrested or targeted, and decades of nearly all the same hard drugs used today being totally legal with massive addiction rates through out society. Go back and look at the earliest anti drug laws and the surrounding debates. It was exactly to target certain immigrants, and they said so at the time, hence banning smoking opium in new York and San Francisco where there were Chinatowns, but not any other way of taking it, as that was a common Chinese way of taking it, just like making crack cocaine carry a ten times heavier sentence than the same amount of powder cocaine, because black people happened to more commonly use the crack form and politicians wanted to look tough on certain groups in the early 90s, despite no medical evidence that it was any more addictive or damaging than the powder form, more commonly used by upper middle class types like frat boys and stock brokers. Another point, a huge number of wall street professionals and London city boys are known to use cocaine and amphetamines to work longer hours, and when certain people are wanted out of a firm, one way to force them out is demand a random urine sample, because there is a good chance they can then simply fire them for drug use.
It never reached 100% but considering most childhood medications contained hard drugs like opium, that most medicine cabinets contained tonics advertising how much cocaine was in them etc, it was pretty massively widespread as there was no taboo or restriction on just buying heroin and cocaine at the grocery store. Addiction levels were extremely high and society survived because most peoples idea of addiction is only the minority form of it, not how most are affected. Millions of drug addicts go unnoticed because they continue their normal life while also getting high. Going by the size of drug cartels and how much they produce, most drug addicts are not classic Hollywood idea of a junkie, most are working, paying taxes, holding down jobs and snorting coke a few times a day, because there are a lot more than is visible. They just don't get noticed as much, if they get noticed, they usually get their life destroyed, get thrown in a cage with serious criminals, lose their job and home, and end up closer to the classic junkie because they take more and more to deal with the stress and boredom and hopelessness they now face.
The point is that massive drug use across society never caused enough reason to ban those drugs. Drugs started to be banned for either racial politics reasons, or out of puritan religious beliefs that found alcohol an equal threat to society, productivity etc. Prohibition of narcotics was not out of a need to save society. Hence the reefer madness panic, where the problems of drugs had to be exaggerated to get them banned for other political reasons. You know, reefer, that stuff that according to 1950s tv, news reports and movies was highly addictive, leads people to go on raping and killing sprees or turn suicidal. The only way to actually get the drugs banned originally was to lie about the social costs of keeping them legal and regulated. Now a lot of the social costs of the drug problem, are caused by them being illegal, the fact people become social outcasts and outlaws, are unable to get hired so have to commit crime, have no job or prospects or hope so get high more often etc. Again, go look at the studies in mice showing if you give them no stimulus but a button that doses them with drugs, they will keep hitting it and just be high all the time until they waste away, where as the same mouse given activities as well as the option to get high, they still get high, but not as much, it is just one of their activities and don't press the button as much, despite getting the same drug. Same has been found in people though it is harder to conclusively study as research is banned in a lot of countries. People with other things going on in their life because they have not been criminalised, can be addicted and use a few times a day, without getting to the point of being unable to function.
Again, do some research, go look at the start of the war on drugs under the Nixon administration. Members of that administration have admitted the increase in targeting drugs was nothing to do with the public good or crime, it was politics. They were having trouble with civil rights activists and anti war demonstrations and figured blacks and hippys used certain substances regularly, so if they went after that, they could lock up some of their political opponents and discredit their movements and communities overall. To give them political cover, they commissioned a neutral study into the societal effects of drug use, which determined there was no reason for cannabis to be illegal and that it made more sense to legalise or decriminalise and then treat hard drug addicts if the goal was to reduce social harm. So the Nixon white house simply buried the report and pretended the experts believed the opposite. If they had been having problems with energy drink hooked millenials, chain smoking old geezers, heavy drinking communities or say Rush Limbaugh, and they thought they could get away with it, they would have simply started a war on caffeine, nicotine, alcohol or prescription drug abuse instead and started highlighting the health issues and claiming that all manner of social ills were connected.
The reefer madness idea the media and government pushed for decades was clearly false as no you cannot overdose, no it is not chemically addictive, no it does not lead to extreme violence or suicidal tendencies, yet that was known to be true, because the facts were twisted. Society survived with overwhelming abuse of modern narcotics like full strength heroin for decades without any big issues or calls for prohibition until it was done for white is right and religious temperance movement reasons, the war on drugs itself was just another sleaze ball tactic of an administration that also used targeted IRS audits and the security services to target their critics and opponents, the head of the DEA still maintains in congressional hearings that cannabis is as bad as heroin. None of this stuff is based on the reality of decriminalisation.
Addicts are already spreading like wild fire, just right now they fuel mobsters shooting it out for sales turf on top of the actual problems. Take away lobbying and 'studies' funded by alcohol companies that don't want competition from other recreational substances, from pharmaceutical companies that do not want people being able to grow their own pain medication in their yard that is non addictive and impossible to overdose on to threaten the profits they try to grow by rewarding doctors who over prescribe expensive pain pills, take away law enforcement agencies that get a lot of funding from criminal asset forfeiture and who use 'I thought I smelt cannabis' anytime they get caught pulling over or arresting someone of a certain background without cause, and by for profit prisons who have fuelled an explosion in incarceration on the back of the drug war, and you really wont find a lot of actual unbiased evidence for the situation you are imagining. It is a mass hysteria fuelled by some very powerful groups, ie politicians who have found a tough on crime niche to get re-elected, law enforcement agencies that need to excuse bigger budgets as actual crime rates drop across the developed world for 25 years while somehow the number of people who need to be locked up is ever increasing only in the USA at the same time, and big businesses with trillions of dollars on the line.
P.s. You are probably perfectly well meaning, but you sound like a lot of speeches from the prohibition of alcohol era. There are speeches exactly like what you said when they were fighting to keep it illegal despite the explosion in violence and organised crime. I cannot remember the name so cannot cite it but there is one which basically goes, ok so the mobsters may have taken over Chicago and other cities, but I say it is worth it if the alternative is to allow liquor to destroy this whole country through a plague of drunkenness. I don't know about you but personally I think Budweiser and jack daniels being on sale at the store is preferable to mobsters producing it, mixing in the odd bit of kerosene or embalming fluid, and having shoot outs in the street with military weaponry like Thompson sub machine guns which outgunned the police and bombing each others speakeasies even if they were full of people. Drugs are available in every town and county anyway, all prohibition does is add extra troubles, like a nation with 5% of the global population having 25% of the global prison population, those narcotics being cut with more toxic but easier to acquire cutting agents, gang violence, massacres in countries that are losing control of regions to cartel control and corruption, which threatens international security, and entirely productive people having their lives destroyed because of the same idea behind, hey, if whiskey is legal, no one is going to work, society will collapse as everyone just gets drunk all the time and becomes useless bums.
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