Part of Yale's Addiction Treatment: Clinical Skills for Healthcare Providers course, this lesson traces the history of alcohol and opioids, the two oldest psychoactive drugs, to show how policy repeats its own mistakes. It moves from ancient brewing and early medicinal use of opium through Prohibition and the Harrison Narcotic Act, then walks through three distinct waves of opioid crises in the United States since the Civil War. The lecture connects each policy shift, from temperance movements to criminalization, to its effect on who could access treatment and who ended up in the criminal justice system instead. The argument throughout is practical rather than purely historical: clinicians who understand these cycles are better equipped to argue for evidence-based, non-punitive addiction treatment today. Delivered as one segment of a longer Yale clinical training series aimed at healthcare providers treating substance use disorder.