ILLEGAL AND LEGAL THINGS

You know how people often lament that things used to be so much
simpler back in the day — a time when men were men and you could
legally cut half of someone’s brain out for being gay? Things weren’t so
simple back when your grandparents or their grandparents were kids, and
all kinds of wild things were legal — from meth to murder. Here are 11
things you used to be able to get away with back in the day that are
helpfully illegal now.

Remember how you used to be able to own people? Fun times.

1. Meth
Like peyote, opium, LSD, mushrooms, heroine and ecstasy, meth used to
be perfectly legal in the U.S. You used to be able to get
metamphetamines from your pharmacist to treat a number of ailments,
including alcoholism, depression, narcolepsy and those pesky Spring
allergies, because they didn’t have Claritin yet. The drug was FDA-
approved in 1944 and became known as “Methedrine” in the 1950s,
when it became wildly popular due to its unintentional addictive
qualities. However, meth abuse became so common that the government
passed the Controlled Substances Act to limit the sale of methedrine –
although you can still get it in small doses under the name of “Desoxyn.”

2. Drinking and Driving

Driving while drunk has been a no-no for some time, but drinking while
consuming alcohol was another matter. To clear it up: You couldn’t be
already drunk when you got in the car, but you could drink in the car. In
1998, the federal government began to enforce Open Container Laws to
stop you from openly chugging a beer bong while swerving into
oncoming traffic. Six TEA-21 laws are in place to ensure Open
Container Laws are enforced, but only 39 of the 50 states follow all six
of them. Although Wyoming, Alaska, Lousiana and Tennessee (among
others) have their own Open Container Laws, they are not as strict or
wide-reaching as the federal ones.

3. Lobotomies
Have you ever seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? Then you know
that partial lobotomies used to be considered an appropriate ways to deal
with mental illness – an encouraged procedure to handle schizophrenia,
depression, suicidal tendencies and other unwanted social problems –
like homosexuality. (It was even sometimes used to treat backaches.) The
procedure became common in the early 20th century and could be
enforced against the individual’s will. According to estimates, the United
States was the worldwide leader in lobotomies, performing between
40,000 and 50,000. The practice was formally banned in 1967, but
reports suggest that lobotomies still occurred throughout the 1980s.

4. Forced Castrations
Have you ever thought about how strange it is that an entire class of
people – the Eunuchs and the Castrati – lived their entire lives as the
victims of forced castrations? Castrations weren’t just legal, but
surprisingly common. Around the world, homosexuality has long been
“treated” with chemical castration, and famed computer scientist Alan
Turing willingly chose castration as an alternate to imprisonment for
homosexuality in 1952, when homosexuality was still illegal. Many
states in the U.S. still “dabble” in chemical castration as a way to deal
with child molesters, with California and Florida allowing the practice in
cases of severe child rape.

5. Domestic violence
In the 18th and 19th centuries, most states went by the “Rule of Thumb,”
in which a man could legally beat his wife as long as the instrument of
abuse was “no wider than the thumb,” which obviously varies by the size
of the hand and the gentleman. Although many states moved to outlaw
domestic violence by the end of the 1800s, others still considered it a
“private matter” between a man and his wife (read: property) and even
those who did penalize partner abuse would only get involved if there
was a witness. Not until the 1970s were women’s groups able to get
society (and the government) to recognize the severity of the problem,
with the first Battered Women’s Shelter opening in 1974, less than 30
years ago.
6. Marital Rape
Traditionally, a woman was considered a “legal minor” under the
supervision of her husband, who was her legal guardian (in the place of
her father). Until the 20th century, the legal system of “coverture” stated
that a woman’s rights were “subsumed by her husband” at the point of
marriage. Because of this, women had few rights or autonomy outside of
marriage – which gave them little recourse to prosecute in instances of
sexual assault from her husband. With the greater visibility of women’s
rights issues, the conversation around criminalizing marital rape began in
the 1970s, but it wasn’t actually outlawed until 1993. However, the
penalties vary from state to state, with South Carolina still requiring
sexual violence of a “high and aggravated nature” to prosecute.

7. Child Labor and Abuse

Childhood used to be a very different thing in the United States, as child
labor and child slavery has been a common practice throughout our
nation’s history. Children used to be the preferred workforce of many
industrial factory owners, as they were less likely to be involved in a
union or strike than their adult counterparts. As the child labor force
reached its apex in the early part of the 20th century, children worked as
laborers in mines, agriculture, textiles and nearly every industry you can
think of – with few states restricting the use of child labor. Child labor
wasn’t regulated until 1938, but child abuse wouldn’t be dealt with until
1974, with the Child Abuse Protection and Treatment Act. This included
physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, gross neglect and
other forms of maltreatment.

8. Murder
My most memorable day of Undergrad was when my Political Science
professor (also our school’s Russian politics czar) informed our class that
it was still legal to have someone killed in Russia. You couldn’t kill
someone, but you could have someone do it for you. This shouldn’t have
been that surprising – because murder was widely legal in the U.S., if
you were killing the right person. If a slavemaster were to execute one of
his slaves, it wasn’t seen or prosecuted as murder – because this was
legally his property, and he could do with it what he liked. (As you
know, raping one’s slaves was also common.) In the case of Native
Americans, murder wasn’t just ignored; it was encouraged in many
cases, with local governments offering rewards for the killing or capture
of Native Americans.

9. Cocaine
One of the great mindfucks of life after high school English class is re-
reading The Great Gatsby and finding out that they were all on a lot of
coke. Cocaine was originally used in the late 1800s as a way to treat
addiction to morphine, after being introduced onto the market in 1879.
However, the drug quickly became a vice of its own, popping up in
Victorian literature of the era. In 1884, Sigmund Freud (a chronic coke
user) even penned a love letter to cocaine, called “Uber Coca,” in which
he praised the drug for its “exhilaration and lasting euphoria.” In
Tennessee at the turn of the century, you could obtain cocaine in local
drugstores, and when Coca-Cola debuted in 1886, it had two major
ingredients: caffeine and cocaine. Why else do you think it would be
called “Coke?”

10. Mailing Children

This sounds like it’s from The Onion, but it’s absolutely real. When the
parcel post service went into effect on January 1, 1913, Americans were
able to send all kinds of things through the mail, revolutionizing the
shipping industry. When it was first introduced, the only regulations
were that the shipment had to weight less than fifty pounds. The
industrious parents of May Pierstroff, a four-year old, decided to use this
service to save money. They mailed the little girl from her home in
Grangeville, Idaho to her grandparents in Lewiston. Instead of paying for
the more expensive train fare, they shelled out all of 53 cents for transit.
Upon learning about this case (and those of other child mailings), the
U.S. Postmaster General quickly banned the mailing of humans.

11. Owning People

Okay, you know this happened “a long time ago,” but it’s not as long as
you think.
Slavery was wildly common in antiquity, with up to one-third of the
population of entire countries being enslaved. The first country to
regulate slavery was Spain, which attempted to prevent abuse of
exploitation of conquered peoples by the Spanish conquistadors.
Denmark-Norway was the first country in Europe to outright ban the
slave trade in 1803 – with Sweden swiftly following, despite never
having slaves trafficked in the country to begin with. Although the U.S.
wouldn’t get around to banning slavery for another sixty years, China
didn’t ban slavery until 1906. The U.N. declared slavery a violation of
global human rights in 1948, but it hung around in Niger, Saudi Arabia,
Yemen, The United Arab Emirates and Oman until the 1960s and 70s.
Mauritania was the last country to outlaw slavery in 1981. That’s less
than two Abigail Breslins ago.