This paper details the history of drug use in American and it's how it's illustrated in the media. This paper will also account for the drug abuse throughout American history and the reasons behind it. There exists no high degree of compliance with the drug issue because, rhetoric to the contrary, this is most emphatically not a "Drug Free America". It never has been, and likely will never be one. Aside from the legal pharmacopoeia, which runs from Prozac, Ritalin and Valium, to caffeine, alcohol and nicotine, drugs are used in their various combinations by the vast majority of citizens. Use of a particular substance can no longer be attributed to a single subculture. The pharmacological and street names of drugs, their effects and side effects, have received good press; society as a whole is more knowledgeable than it was.
