For most people around the world, New York is ‘the’ city to visit. From the Big Apple, to Broadway, to the Statue of Liberty it is a modern wonder of the world.

Yet the city has a well documented dark side too rife with crime and danger on many corners. Drugs of course are one of the biggest problems that the police have had to deal with for more than fifty years.

From the casual recreationalist to the hard user and of course the cause of the problem the drug dealers and traffickers bringing in the product, the police have got their work cut out.

Of course over time drugs come and go out of fashion for different reasons. One reason for these changes is police cracking down hard, making dealing near impossible.

Others are due to the efforts of the United States government changing the laws classifying a drug as A Class after results of one of their expensive research programs.

One of the biggest reasons is the change in fashion as with the nature of fashion the consumer has an unrelenting desire for bigger, better and faster.

The unbelievably profitable drug industry is no different when it comes to reinventing itself and we only have to look at the history of New York’s drug scene to see that.

In the beginning there was morphine which was given to patients before and after their operations around 1900. Then prescribed morphine continued to be used during recuperation resulting in addiction and for the most part involuntary too.

With its opium dens drying up due to the criminalization of the hard drug and it’s cousins, including heroine which was widely used at this time, New Yorkers looked elsewhere for their kicks and found them in marihuana.

Then in the thirties came the marihuana law that prohibited its use much to the dismay of the New York drug users and jazz musicians – the rappers of the past. The usage was so high at one point that the government tried using scare tactics to warn people of it.

The story goes that commissioner Anslinger famously claimed that marihuana caused, “death, criminality and insanity” which was met by a spate of insanity pleas by murderers all going unpunished.

The most outlandish case was in New York State itself after two police officers were shot dead in cold blood. The defendant pleaded insanity through marihuana use and was acquitted regardless of the fact that there was no material evidence that he had even used the drug.

What followed was a series of backtracking by the US Drug commission as it was proved that Marihuana made the user passive and not insane or murderous.

As resourceful as ever Uncle Sam found a way around the problem and in the late 1950’s classified it with all other drugs under the rationale that “marihuana is a stepping stone to heroine addiction.”

Of course this clamp down on the New Yorkers and the whole American public in general led to a rebellious element in The Sixties and by the end of the decade things were only going to get worse.