History of Legal and Illegal Drugs from 1920 to 1925 A.D. About the history of legal and illegal drugs from 1920 to 1925 A.D. in particular government acts, the use of Peyote by Indians, bans on cigarettes and heroin. 1921 The U.S. Treasury Dept. issues regulations outlining the treatment of addiction permitted under the Harrison Act. In Syracuse, N.Y., the narcotics clinic doctors report curing 90% of their addicts. 1921 Thomas S. Blair, MD, chief of the Bureau of Drug Control of the Pennsylvania Dept. of Health, publishes a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association in which he characterizes the Indian peyote religion a "habit indulgence in certain cactaceous plants," calls the belief simply a "superstition" and those who sell peyote "dope vendors," and urges the passage of a bill in Congress that would prohibit the use of peyote among the Indian tribes of the Southwest. He concludes with this revealing plea for abolition: "The great difficulty in suppressing this habit among the Indians arises from the fact that the commercial interests involved in the peyote traffic are strongly entrenched, and they exploit the Indian. . . . Added to this is the superstition of the Indian who believes in the Peyote Church. As soon as an effort is made to suppress peyote, the cry is raised that it is unconstitutional to do so and is an invasion of religious liberty. Suppose the Negroes of the South had a Cocaine Church!" 1921 Cigarettes are illegal in 14 States, and 92 anticigarette bills are pending in 28 States. Young women are expelled from college for smoking cigarettes. 1921 The Council of the American Medical Association refuses to confirm the association's 1917 resolution on alcohol. In the 1st 6 months after the enactment of the Volstead Act, more than 15,000 physicians and 57,000 druggists and drug manufactures apply for licenses to prescribe and sell liquor. 1921 Alfred C. Prentice, MD, a member of the Committee on Narcotic Drugs of the American Medical Association, declares: "Public opinion regarding the vice of drug addiction has been deliberately and consistently corrupted through propaganda in both the medical and lay press. . . . The shallow pretense that drug addiction is a 'disease' . . . has been asserted and urged in volumes of 'literature' by self-styled 'specialists.'" 1924 The manufacture of heroin is prohibited in the U.S. 1925 Robert A. Schless: "I believe that most drug addiction today is due directly to the Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act, which forbids the sale of narcotics without a physician's prescription. . . . Addicts who are broke act as agents provocateurs for the peddlers, being rewarded by gifts of heroin or credit for supplies. The Harrison Act made the drug peddler, and the drug peddler makes drug addicts."