Why do police use the term narcotic for stimulants like cocaine or methamphetamine?

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Why do police use the term narcotic for stimulants like cocaine or methamphetamine?

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In US legal context a narcotic is defined as a drug that is totally prohibited unlike a prescription drug. Even though this definition is not the same as the medical scientific definition of narcotics this fact have been tried in appeals court without any changes to the legal definition or its interpretation. The issue came about because the first drugs that caused massive problems in society and had to be outlawed were narcotics like opioids. And when the laws were enacted the term narcotic were used as a blanket term for all illegal drugs. But this have the unfortunate implication that a doctor will call morphine a narcotic while a police will not and instead calls cocaine a narcotic which a doctor will disagree with.