If I can add to the question, I've seen some sources that say there was an opioid epidemic in the US in the wake of the American Civil War:
https://journalofthecivilwarera.org/2016/11/civil-war-veterans-opiate-addiction-gilded-age/
Can anyone comment on whether this is true? Or what the effects were on society at the time?
Former nurse here (just a buff not an expert, hope it is okay to post)... There defiantly was an epidemic, which sparked the temperance and prohibition movements and is why why heroin, cocaine and alcohol became regulated.
With the post-civil war is were it really begins, with trauma (both physical and mental) many became addicted to various substances (particularly opioid drugs and alcohol). The mid-late 1800's is when herbal apothecaries began turning into pharmacies with branded products and perpetration containing increasingly refined drugs, but chemists still had little knowledge of addiction, for instance Bayer started marketing heroin as a non addictive replacement for morphine/codeine as a cough medicine in the 1870's.
There are scads of historical accounts of medical professionals prescribing one hard drug to treat addition to another, opioid were used to treat alcoholism, and one of the first medical uses of cocaine was to treat opioid addiction (1880's). Recreational use, self-medication and prescription use became very conflated during this period, bringing about a huge increase in temperance movements, and temperance brought about some of the first prohibition laws requiring prescription from a pharmacist, chemist or physician (Rx standards were very loose until the early 1900's though).
As temperance movements rose drug and alcohol use was not squashed but rather moved to the black market, or through prescriptions (or by going to the next town or county as laws were rarely state wide). Addiction and death rates also rose, exponentially. By the 1900's there was more federal oversight to combat these issues, acts such as the US The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, establishment of the Bureau of Chemistry in 1901, the UK Rolleston Committee in 1926, and the general tightening and regulations of medical professions such as nursing, pharmacy, doctors, surgeons, etc, and of course prohibition.
After WW1 and WW2 there was also a increase in drug addiction and drug related deaths, as there was after the Civil War, but not to the same extent... Though number about death rates in the 1800's are somewhat hard to come by, many in the field suggest that we began approaching the same rates in 2016 as in 1800, but I have not been able to confim this. Opioid deaths are about 100 per million in the USA, which accounts for between 25% to 30% of world OD rates according to the WHO.
Weren't the Opium Wars in part triggered by China's refusal to import British opium because of the severity of a drug epidemic sweeping the country (along with other political and economic motivations too like sovereignty and trade concessions)?
The reason tobacco never really got attacked the way that alcohol, opium, marijuana, and cocaine did has to do with moral panic more than anything else, though I can't stress enough that there really was an addiction problem to be dealt with for the four drugs I listed. I'll break it down by drug, because the histories are different for each one. Long story short, tobacco was universal during the era and not associated with any particular social ills, and the discovery that smoking is bad for you had to wait until the 1960s to really become public knowledge. In contrast, opium, cocaine and marijuana were all associated with racist moral panics, and alcohol addiction in the United States was an enormous, unavoidable social problem, comparable to the obesity epidemic today.
Opium and cocaine: Opium and cocaine used to be basically free for purchase in the United States. This eventually led to major social issues, especially given that it was common practice at the time for dangerous patent medicines to be made up of hard liquor laced with opium or cocaine. There was a clear public health and consumer protection problem to be addressed, which is why initially federal drug control acts focused on limiting usage, through the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Harrison Act. (Also, racism played a huge role. Cocaine-crazed Negroes rampaging through the streets, or opium-addicted Chinamen were seen as threats to American society.)
Thus, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, for instance, required any "dangerous" or "addictive" substances to be listed on a pharmaceutical's label, including opium, alcohol, and cocaine. The Harrison Act of 1913 effectively banned cocaine and opium for nonmedical uses by imposing prohibitive taxes.
Marijuana: Marijuana was introduced by West Indians and Mexicans to America, and led to a series of moral panics that led to the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which regulated cannabis in much the same way that opium and cocaine were regulated at the time. (If you want a good look at what the moral panic looked like, the 1936 movie "Reefer Madness" cleanly encapsulates the fears of the era.)
Alcohol: The sale, transport and manufacture of alcohol was banned by the 18th Amendment in 1919; this was later reversed in 1933 by the 21st Amendment. As I've posted before:
Drunkenness was a major social crisis, as alcohol was cheap, plentiful, and one of the few amusements available to the poor. In the period 1865-1919, mass immigration and the breakdown of the former social controls that had kept drunkenness in check during the preindustrial era led to a mass public health crisis due to ubiquitous, largely unregulated alcohol. It didn't help that these problems were heavily apparent among urban immigrants, like Jews, Germans and Irish, which played directly into the nativist fears of rural Anglo-Saxon Protestants. (It's not an accident that the South was heavily in favor of Prohibition.) The war on alcohol was a decades-long project, just like the war on obesity is today. And just like obesity, the same kinds of players emerge, with, say, PepsiCo and McDonald's playing the same type of role as Anheuser Busch and Pabst did a century ago.
Sources: Daniel Okrent, Last Call; Thomas Quinn & Gerald McLaughlin, The Evolution of Federal Drug Control Legislation, 22 Cath. U. L. Rev. 586 (1973).
During the 19th century in China saw The Opium wars.Conflict over colonial trade and clearly Opium trade.