British Policies on Opiate Addiction

Abstract

It is now ten years since the Drug Clinics were set up. In the early 1960's a long established equilibrium broke down, and the number of narcotic addicts known to the Home Office began to rise steeply. The new addicts were predominantly in their early 20's, and drugs were being obtained either from the over-generous prescribing of a handful of doctors or from the spill-over of this prescribing to the black market (Bewley, 1965 (1), 1966 (2)). Heroin was the essential agent of this epidemic, with cocaine as the major ancillary.

Ten‐year Follow‐up of a Representative Sample of London Heroin Addicts: Clinic Attendance, Abstinence and Mortality

“…1. The value of the Home Office index as an epidemiological monitor of current trends in narcotic addiction has been questioned by many investigators [8,9,10]. However the records are generally valid and internally consistent [13,14] and the index seems to be a fairly reliable instrument for follow-up studies of registered DDC patients with regard to clinic attendance and mortality.…”

“…There is currently a controversy over the efficacy of the DDCs in dealing with the drug problem [8,9,10]. The purpose of this paper is to examine how far the original intentions of treatment policy have been realized 12 years after its implementation and to comment on clinic attendance, prescription status, mortality and abstinence, as evidenced by the records of the Home Office Drugs Branch in July 1979.…”

The Processes of Referral and Disposal within a London Drug Dependence Clinic

“…The predominance of opiate-related referrals is not surprising since the clinic system was established mainly to deal with this problem. However, as Edwards [4], points out, this emphasis upon opiate abusers has led to other sorts of drug problem not being dealt with by most drug clinics. In the case of the sp)ecific clinic in this study, non-opiate drug referrals are accepted but are comparatively rare.…”

“…7]. Edwards [4] commented that 'discussion of the future of treatment policies is much handicapped by lack of current information about what is actually being done' in the clinics.…”

Use of psychiatric drug treatment services by heroin users from general practice.

“…As the scale of drug abuse in Britain escalates beyond the levels foreseen at the inception of these centres, however, there is little multidisciplinary coordination and scant information on the uptake, activity, and efficacy of existing psychiatric drug treatment services. 6 Studies of drug dependence clinics have often failed to produce the information critical for planning policies for treatment. Love and Gossop, in attempting to describe what was actually being done in the clinics, investigated the process of referral and the progress of patients through a specialised London unit, "one of a few such facilities in the UK," which was not, therefore, representative of most unspecialised psychiatric drug treatment services available.…”