A Brief History of British Drug Policy, 1950-2001

Abstract

Following the establishment of the so-called “New British System” (based on the recommendations of the Rolleston Committee in 1926), numbers of recorded opiate and cocaine addicts fell significantly in the early 1930s and remained stable and at a relatively low level for the next two decades. It was in the latter part of the 1950s that reports of a new drug “epidemic” began to circulate. Concerns centred on the use of drugs by ethnic minorities, notably black West Indians and Africans in ‘blues clubs’ and visiting black American musicians in jazz clubs. Once again the drugs epidemic was associated with jazz (“jungle”) music and colour. By the end of the 1960s, young white teenagers had become involved too and the world had seen the student riots in Paris; the birth of Swinging London with its attendant Merseybeat; the hippy revolution in San Francisco; and a growing youth protest, both in the USA and Britain, over western military involvement in Vietnam. Politicians and journalists invariably associated these events with the use of drugs by young people. Over the last four decades of the 20th Century, the use of drugs by young people (and the attendant treatment industry) has grown exponentially and the focus has moved from individual treatment to public health and infection control to the current preoccupation with drugs/crime connection. This brief history attempts to summarise these developments in a short article chronicling the major milestones and events

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“…The analysis of the tensions inherent in the shift in official government thinking during the last three decades, from individual treatment models, through public health strategies, to the uneasy combination of crime enforcement and harm reduction, is familiar (Pearson, 1999;Yates, 2002). It is likely that one reason for the incoherence in official strategy has been sensitivity to news coverage.…”

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“…Desde la aparición de los Teddy Boys en el Reino Unido en la década de 1950, asociados con el rock and roll y un modo de vestir característico (Yates, 2002), comienza a hablarse de la cultura juvenil. Es especialmente a partir de los años ochenta y noventa cuando la edad se utiliza en las investigaciones de mercado como variable explicativa del tipo de consumo (Bocock, 1995).…”

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“…Initially, this change of direction in UK drug policy was triggered by concerns over the infection potential of needle-sharing drug users (Yates, 2002) with the emergence of HIV/AIDS. More latterly, the dominance of a treatment response essentially predicated upon containment and management of the problem has been further sustained by concerns over the apparent relationship between drug misuse and crime.…”