Study the dose; not ban the use

An undiluted teaspoon of the safrole, or sassafras oil, can indeed produce ill effects, including an account of collapse. In proper doses, however, it relieves numerous ills. Here is an early account of its benefits: Title -"SASSAFRAS
JOYFUL NEWES OUT OF THE NEWE FOUNDE WORLDE!"See botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/s/sassaf20.

Go to ancientgreece-earlyamerica.com/html/gosnold.htm, and do a "find" for "sassafras." Much of the information in this post stems from that site.

Sassafras was the only North American spice, used in Cajun and Creole cooking - file powder in gumbos. Its safrole is damaging to the liver in huge amounts; and it is an ingredient in ecstasy, the site says. Good for joint pain, rashes and gout still. Good root beer needs it. Not needed for syphilis any more - with penicillin.

It was seen in the 17th century as a wonder drug, people paying high prices for it, sassafras found first in Florida, Indians taught the French, French taught the Spanish, and it cured many diseases: lameness, stomach pains, breast pains, toothache, possibly kidney stones ("stone breaker" says the site, but I believe from other sources that referred to the Latin-Roman notes that sassafras could break rocks?) gout, joint pain, "foule handes," constipation, "windiness," "provoked the flow urine," gout, and make the barren women fertile. It also cured the Poxe - syphilis. Fair use quote on that:

" It was a disease of the New World and it hammered Europe, just as the Old World diseases were pounding away at the Americas. In the first years of the European outbreaks (late 1490’s) it was a quick and fatal infection. Then the selfish bug and European man adapted ever so slightly and it became a slow ten year dance of death. But a cure was found: take the steeped water of the Sassafras root for a ‘greate tyme’. It was new and expensive; and the cure came from the very source of the misery: America! And what a market there was in Europe. Three shillings for a pound of the wood (~$25 today) and much more for the roots. A single ship could bring back tons. And it worked!

Or maybe it didn’t. The combination of low life expectancy in the 17^th century (less than 45 years) and the apparent remission of syphilis while it silently hid in the body, liquefying the vital organs, between waves of outward eruptions, made Sassafras, or any drug for that matter, look like a cure."