Over the years, the United States has adopted different policies to control and regulate the manufacturing, distribution, and access to drugs. The state adopted different approaches during different times depending on the existing trends and drug-related activities. Therefore, it is essential to review these legislations that shaped the basis of the current drug laws in the United States.
Until the end of the 19 th century, it was legal to distribute and use psychoactive drugs, cocaine, morphine, and opium. Opium could be accessed without a prescription, and it was a common ingredient in some medicinal drugs like painkillers. The start of the new century witnessed significant changes in terms of legislation that would affect how drugs were distributed and used. In 1906, the U.S Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act (Kleiman et al., 2011) . This particular legislation was met with unrelenting opposition from the patent medicine industry. This law required all medicines that were sold over-the-counter to display the amounts of drugs that they contained. The objective was to discourage the consumption of such medicine.
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This was followed by the Opium Smoking Act of 1909. This Act was then amended in 1914. The Act imposed a ban on the importation of drugs for recreational purposes (Dolin, 2001) . It only allowed those that were medically important. This caused a reduction in the amount of harmful drugs that were entering the country. In 1914, The Harrison Narcotic Act was passed. It marked a significant development in the drug enforcement legislation in America. The earlier legislation passed in 1909 had banned the importation of opium. After some time, people started demanding more federal action to reduce the prevalence of addictive drugs. The Harrison Act was initially enacted to limit the distribution of cocaine and heroin only to physicians for medical purposes. This Act would soon be altered in line with international controls, taxation, and interstate transfer. The new legislation required all drug sellers to be licensed and to maintain proper records for taxation purposes. It was challenged in court but upheld by the Supreme Court as a revenue act. Due to fear of prosecution, the supply of opiates and some other drugs went down significantly in the early 1920s.
In 1937, the Marihuana Tax Act was passed, which allowed federal control over marijuana in relation to Congress' revenue authority. The legislation was met by opposition from the American Medical Association, but it was fully supported by the leader of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Henry J. Anslinger. In 1970, the Controlled Substances Act was enacted. It repealed most of the earlier legislation, including the Marihuana Tax Act and the Harrison Act (Dolin, 2001) . It is the basis of the federal drug law in America today. It provides schedules that categorize drugs and stipulates how drugs are controlled to varying degrees. The Comprehensive Control Act, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, and the Anti-Drug Abuse amendment act were enacted in 1984, 1986, and 1988 (Dolin, 2001) . Consequences included better coordination of state drug control efforts, rising funding for drug control measures, and increased federal penalties for offenses related to drugs.
Over the last 20 years, federal legislation has mostly focused on synthetic drugs like ecstasy. The illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act enacted in 2003 amended the CSA. It targeted the distributors and enablers of synthetic drugs directly. Club drugs like molly and ecstasy reduced in amounts because of the awareness created by the DEA (King et al., 2013) . In 2012, the Synthetic Drug Abuse Prevention Act was enacted, giving the DEA more temporary scheduling authority. Even though marijuana is a schedule 1 controlled substance under the CSA, states have resorted to deviate from federal restrictions and have put in place policies that allow usage of marijuana both medically and for recreation.
References
Dolin, B. (2001, July 24). National drug policy: United States of America . https://sencanada.ca/content/sen/committee/371/ille/library/dolin2-e.htm
King, L. A., Ujváry, I., & Brandt, S. D. (2013). Drug laws and the 'derivative' problem. Drug Testing and Analysis , 6 (7-8), 879-883. https://doi.org/10.1002/dta.1523
Kleiman, M. A., Caulkins, J. P., & Hawken, A. (2011). Why have drug laws? Drugs and Drug Policy . https://doi.org/10.1093/wentk/9780199764518.003.0003
