A long ways back when I was about 19, I met up with a friend who'd been expelled from our high school at a party, and he proceeded to evangelize me on the glories of "wet." In his opinion, only black people had to fear the dangerous negative effects (or the superhuman positive effects, I suppose). For white people, PCP was just a relaxing high, like weed but better, nothing to fear. (I couldn't tell you what he thought Latinos should expect from the stuff, let alone Asians etc.)
Even though his PCP use seemed hardcore at the time, in retrospect it makes me a little nostalgic for the innocence of the early 2000s... when being an "E-tard" was of great concern and Erowid was kickstarting the "Robotripping" boom... that time before a chunk of my generation (including me) was sliced off by opiates (the best drug, objectively speaking LOL) -- some never to return, others to degenerate, others to find their HP in the BB and work at the rehabs they attended...
Anyways, other places have their idiosyncrasies too. Like why do they bother pressing Captagon tablets into this day and age, when they could just have amphetamine sulfate (with or without theophylline) in powder form? As the Fiddler on the Roof says, "TRADITION..." Or "Morphia" ("marfia"?) tablets in Pakistan -- a form of water-soluble heroin #4 pressed into tablets for injection. But the US had some weird ones -- "Ts and Blues" (pentazocine and tripelennamine), "Dors and 4s" (glutethimide and codeine/APAP), MDA starting in the late 60s.
And yes, it has to be admitted that the US has always been a dope-loving nation, even 100 years ago or 120 years ago, when we had way more morphinists and cokies per capita than the European nations or Canada, more opiate addicts than anywhere except China (where the mild opium smoking habit was dominant, not the heavy duty hypodermic morphine/cocaine habit as in late 19th c. US).
You could play pop psychoanalyst, say it's decompensation for puritanical norms, or say it's laissez-faire capitalism run amok, or the terrible results of failed prohibition policies. But at the end of the day, who knows? Maybe it's' just "national character" (as un-PC as that is): a taste for excess in all its forms -- Hollywood, skyscrapers, amusements, junk food, drugs, etc. -- only surpassedb by our taste for hypocrisy. (Which makes it especially irritating to see these charlatans heaping righteous scorn on Big Pharma -- come on, you knew that Oxycontin was not fucking aspirin; it just felt good, so you did it -- I am in 100% agreement on that assesment.