It's funny how humans tend to fully forget about things that happened only 100 years prior.
Back in the late 1800's and early 1900's, some 50% of the American population was addicted to opiates in one form or another, usually without even realizing it (due to there being no failed drug laws yet, and no laws regarding the listing of ingredients on common "elixirs"). And yet, we didn't live in some apocalyptic wasteland with drug addled zombies roaming the land, we had a very modern, progressive, civilized society. Just look up images of America in the 1890's to see what America would look like without asinine drug laws, and with a large part of the population physically dependent upon legal narcotics.
Well, there were certainly parts of post Civil War America that could be properly described as a post-apocalypic wasteland. But this was the clearly the fault of state and federal politicians, not the traveling medicine shows and pharmacies.
Back in the late 1800's and early 1900's, some 50% of the American population was addicted to opiates in one form or another, usually without even realizing it (due to there being no failed drug laws yet, and no laws regarding the listing of ingredients on common "elixirs"). And yet, we didn't live in some apocalyptic wasteland with drug addled zombies roaming the land, we had a very modern, progressive, civilized society. Just look up images of America in the 1890's to see what America would look like without asinine drug laws, and with a large part of the population physically dependent upon legal narcotics.