It would not be unprecedented.

During the Nixon administration, a time of anti-drug hysteria and a "war on drugs" aimed mostly at hippies, Chicanos and black folks, Attorney General John Mitchell persecuted users of marijuana, mushrooms, and the psychedelics with draconian laws and policies designed to destroy the lives and futures of American youth because of their activism in the anti Vietnam War movement. The plan was to destroy the counter-culture, and it succeeded.

About the same time, Big Pharma was aggressively marketing a group of dangerously psychoactive compounds aimed at middle-class housewives and other affluent users, drugs embraced by the medical profession as virtual cure-alls for all sorts of bogus neuroses and emotional complaints then popular among the Moral Majority.

In spite of the virulent anti-drug propaganda and policies of the Watergate Wonder, no effort was ever made to institute controls on these uppers, downers, tranquilizers, barbiturates, amphetamines and other non-recreational prescription drugs which became popular about that time. Meanwhile, the round-up and incarceration of youngsters getting high proceeded with an unprecedented ferocity. Thousands of young lives and careers destroyed in an orgy of spite and vindictiveness, while no special actions were ever taken to control the spread of the pills. "There are already laws in place to control illegal drug use."

The pattern continues today: Black crack users are severely punished with zero-tolerance jail time while white business major cocaine sniffers get fines and parole. And of course, pillbillies and prescription opiod addicts in Appalachia and Smalltown America are directed towards halfway houses, tough love and rehab programs.

Even the Stones felt compelled to comment on this peculiar American phenomenon.