Introduction: The Quiet Times
The quiet times . This was the term given by British civil servant and student of drug regulation, Bing Spear , who worked at the Home Office Drugs Branch between 1952 and 1986. The period reaching from the late 1920s to the early 1960s was regarded as ‘quiet’ because it was believed, by Spear and by the majority of the academic researchers, that there was little or no ‘drug underground’ in these years and that those dependent on morphine or heroin were middle-aged, middle-class addicts who complied with the medical model and with the doctors that supplied them. This book explores the quiet times, and just how quiet they really were.
For much of the twentieth century, a kind of dance was played out between the forces that sought to regulate what were then known as ‘dangerous drugs’, restricting their use to ‘medical and scientific’ purposes, and those who wished to consume these substances for pleasure and entertainment. This book maps out the movements of this dance during the half-century of the classic ‘British System’, a period that has hitherto been explored by historians only at its extremities, its beginning and its end. The book takes two interwoven analytical targets—the white drug culture and the web of regulation that was brought to bear upon it. Most histories of drugs have concentrated either on the regulation of drugs or on transgressive populations and drug cultures; a key argument here is that the two are mutually constitutive and best explored together.
The book examines the emergence, development and operation of the white drug culture in Britain—particularly London—together with its regulatory architecture. It contends that current views situating the advent of the opioid culture in the 1950s and 1960s are based on a number of erroneous assumptions and readings and that a heroin- or morphine- and cocaine- using culture (‘white drugs ’) emerged during the interwar period. The 1930s, in particular, saw this culture crystallising out of upper-class bohemia and from the night-time economy of London’s West End. In addition, the role played by the prescribing doctors of the ‘British System ’ was a key component in this formative process.
What became known and mythologised as ‘the British System’ was designed to regulate the use of those materials that were then termed ‘dangerous drugs’. In this work, I understand the latter term as referring not so much to a pharmacological and pharmaceutical object as a cultural one—a symbolic object that was, and still is, deployed as an indicator of the health or pathology of individuals and societies. At least as much as they are chemicals, drugs are objects of social and cultural war.1 The UK’s system of dealing with the consumption of these substances, which often involved the medical supply of doses to their consumers, came to be known as the ‘British System’, particularly in the USA, which, in its domestic setting, developed a highly restrictive set of arrangements centred on the prohibition of heroin.
The Rolleston Committee and the British System
The 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act was established in order to satisfy the obligations to which Britain had signed up when it ratified the International Opium Convention of 1912.2 While minimal regulations had previously applied to drugs such as opium, cocaine and morphine, these substances could now only be produced, exchanged and consumed by those authorised by the Act, or by individuals possessing a valid prescription from a medical practitioner.3 The objective was to confine such ‘dangerous drugs’ to ‘medical and legitimate purposes’, an imperative deriving from the International Opium Convention .4 However, though robust policing did succeed in limiting drug use and largely suppressing the street drug trade in London’s West End, the problem of the doctor as gatekeeper to drugs, and of the forging of prescriptions, continued to grow. For the Home Office, which was the government department responsible for regulating dangerous drugs, the core problem was the prescription of drugs to addicts by doctors, which it sought to curtail, particularly in cases of long-term or indefinite supply, and which it regarded as merely pandering to the drug habit rather than constituting a bona fide medical treatment.
In response to these conditions, a committee was set up under the chairmanship of the eminent physician Humphrey Rolleston, its primary brief being to consider in what circumstances, if any, ‘the supply of morphine and heroin…to persons suffering from addiction to those drugs may be regarded as medically advisable’.5 The conclusions of the Rolleston Committee with respect to this question form the core of what became known as the ‘British System’. Owing to their subsequent importance, these passages are worth quoting in full:
There are two groups of persons suffering from addiction to whom administration of morphine or heroin may be regarded as legitimate medical treatment namely:
- (a)
Those who are undergoing treatment for cure of the addiction by the gradual withdrawal method;- (b)
Persons for whom, after every effort has been made for the cure of the addiction, the drug cannot be completely withdrawn, either because: (i) Complete withdrawal produces serious symptoms which cannot be satisfactorily treated under the ordinary conditions of private practice; or (ii) The patient, while capable of leading a useful and fairly normal life so long as he takes a certain non-progressive quantity, usually small, of the drug of addiction, ceases to be able to do so when the regular allowance is withdrawn.6
The British System, then, was understood as an institutional and therapeutic regime that viewed addiction as a disease and sought to treat it by permitting doctors to supply legitimate doses of drugs, usually on prescription, though doctors could also directly supply doses to their addict patients by injection. The system was established by the regulatory take-up of Rolleston’s recommendations. While the concept of the British System has received extensive critical comment from UK researchers sceptical toward the claims of American liberals, it is worth recalling that the Rolleston Committee’s report was a highly significant text, and had considerable impact on the lives of those dependent on the drugs in question, whose counterparts in the USA did indeed suffer greatly at the hands of prohibitive laws.7 That said, the notion of the British System has resulted in considerable distortion and led to some significant lacunae in research.8 The system of regulation in place in the classic years of British drug control included, in an integral role, the Home Office, the police and the courts; it was never an exclusively medical approach. Moreover, the practices of ‘drug treatment’ themselves involved the exercise of power over the mind and body of the addict; the ‘treatment or control’ dichotomy is a misleading formulation.9
Exploring the Quiet Times
The customary story of illicit drug use in Britain tells us that following its initial blooming during and immediately after the First World War, the authorities were successful in the suppression of this early drug culture, leaving opiate use confined to a respectable and compliant population of middle-class, medicalised addicts. Many academic drug historians gained the impression that there was, essentially, little or nothing to study during this period, the narcotic landscape being more or less bare. The use of drugs for pleasure, the story goes, did not arise until the postwar boom of the 1960s, when a new type of consumer arrived on the scene—young, working class, male, and susceptible to the pernicious influence of the discourse of the North American ‘junkie’. The intervening period between the 1920s and the late 1950s has been termed the ‘quiet times’.10
As far back as the 1930s, Alfred Lindesmith, a politically engaged US sociologist who received graduate training at the University of Chicago, was arguing that the UK lacked a drug culture as a result of the country’s medical orientation toward drug control. Lindesmith was a continuous thorn in the side of the US control system, whose punitive ethos he strongly opposed; he was allegedly subjected to a smear campaign by Harry Anslinger, chief of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, intended to suppress his dissident views on the US approach.11 Lindesmith was an early proponent of the British System, believing that the prescription of opiates to addicts had, among other things, prevented the formation of a drug culture. It became a widespread view among supporters of the British System and those who had been influenced by them.12
Of course, the narrative of the quiet times was not the only reason why this gap has remained in the historiography. The specific political focus of many UK sociologists and the social and cultural changes associated with the Second World War directed research into drug-using groups toward postwar working-class youth culture. In addition, the numbers involved in using drugs for pleasure and entertainment were small during the quiet times, even if the Home Office’s data, which were drawn from often highly ineffective police inspections of retail pharmacies, almost certainly under-represented the size of the drug-using population. Whatever the precise figures were—and they are lost to us now—the period’s opioid users possessed a cultural significance out of proportion with their numbers. Furthermore, a detailed examination of the historical records indicates that they did form a distinct drug culture, mostly centred on London.
Sources
There is precious little academic historical work on the drug-using networks of the quiet times, nor on the regulatory regime designed to prevent them from using drugs for nonmedical purposes. Such research as does exist is reviewed in this chapter. However, the primary sources upon which the project depends are archival ones, located in the National Archive , the British Library, the Royal College of Physicians Archive and various online newspaper archives.
Perhaps the most important of these materials consist in Home Office, Metropolitan Police and Ministry of Health files on the regulation of the drug cultures of the 1930s. One of these, dealing with the Chelsea-based addict Brenda Dean Paul, is a large and extremely rich source. It was opened under a Freedom of Information Act request by the author, as were several other files dealing with the doctors who prescribed for these and other groups of addicts. Another source that would have been of immense value to researchers was the Addicts Index, a listing officially begun in 1934 but which had probably been kept from the mid-1920s, in order to monitor the prevalence of addiction in the UK. To the great loss of historical research on drug use in the UK, the Addicts Index was mistakenly destroyed in the 1990s and its data l...