The problem of heroin misuse which has recently taken a new turn in some of Britain's run-down, working-class neighbourhoods and housing estates must be set alongside the burden of mass unemployment which lies upon so many of these same localities. It is as well to say at the outset that I do not mean by this that there is any necessary or mechanical relationship between unemployment and heroin use. This is obviously not true. If it were, then one would not find heroin being used in the social orbit of wealthy pop stars. Nor among those decadent upper reaches of 'Old England' where the young heirs and heiresses to multi-million pound fortunes, débutantes and Oxford undergraduates have apparently grown tired of only champagne for breakfast. Nor among young people in some of the more modestly affluent leafy suburbs whose heroin habits are sometimes nursed by their prosperous mothers and fathers.

Nevertheless, on all the available evidence there is undoubtedly an important and significant relationship between the problem of mass unemployment and Britain's new heroin problem, both of which have grown substantially since 1979 or thereabouts. The course which heroin takes in a person's life, or within their immediate community, will also differ significantly according to these other differences in opportunities and available resources. On this view, unemployment will make the effects of heroin more devastating, both for the individual user, his or her family, and the surrounding neighbourhood. The circumstances of unemployment will make it more likely that heroin misuse will spread more rapidly within a neighbourhood, once the drug has become available. Finally, the absence of a work status, with its rewards and commitments to compete with the claims of heroin, will make it more difficult for a user to relinquish the drug and its accompanying life-style.

It is often said that 'Heroin is the ideal drug for the unemployed'. But what exactly does that mean? My aim here will be to 'unpack' the various kinds of relationship between heroin use and unemployment which might (and indeed do) exist, and to show how these work on a number of different levels. I will draw partly on experience gained through research in the north of England during the spring and summer months of 1985 on behalf of the Health Education Council (cf. Pearson et al., 1986), together with a variety of other research and writing both on drug misuse and the social and personal effects of unemployment. The assembled evidence suggests that it is futile to deny the links between unemployment and heroin. Equally, it would be wrong to suggest that these are anything but complex. 'The argument can neither be won nor lost by sticking to all-too-simple formulations such as whether or not unemployment 'causes' heroin misuse.

Some initial confusions and complexities

The relationship between heroin use and urban deprivation is not a new discovery, and it has been a matter of concern for many years in some North American cities such as Chicago and New York. In The Road to H, for example, a major study of heroin use among young delinquents in New York in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was found that the problem was not evenly distributed across the city. Rather, it was most densely concentrated in some of the city's worst slums, inhabited largely by Puerto Rican and black workers during the period of large-scale migration to New York, causing the authors of the study to speculate on whether a sense of futility and hopelessness in slum districts increased the likelihood that young people would experiment with narcotics (Chein et al., 1964). In the years immediately following the Second World War, it had been in these same parts of New York that heroin misuse had first become prevalent. Heroin was cheap and plentiful, and between 1947 and 1951 it established itself as a social drug in use among adult migrant workers in these poor districts (Preble and Casey, 1969). The Chicago experience was somewhat different, however, in that the heroin epidemic which peaked around 1949 began initially on Chicago's negro south side with its swinging night-spots and the jazz scene among 'hip, street-wise, non-delinquents', and only from the early 1950s onwards did the heroin problem come to be increasingly identified with the lower-class delinquent 'dope fiend' (Hughes et al. , 1972).

One must be careful to distinguish, then, the initiating circumstances of a heroin epidemic from its subsequent development. Once established, however, the connections between heroin misuse and urban deprivation have been consistently noted in Chicago and New York through the 1960s and 1970s, and the densest concentration of heroin use and street-dealing in New York remains the poor ghetto districts of central and east Harlem (Johnson et aL , 1985; Hughes, 1977).

In Britain opiate use was, of course, virtually unknown throughout the 1940s and 1950s, although in London there were tiny gatherings of people around the West End jazz and 'bebop' clubs who were using heroin and other drugs (cf. Spear, 1969; MacInnes, 1985). During the 1960s, as patterns of drug use began to change, a large amount of concern focused on the use of 'pep pills' by young people and although heroin was undoubtedly becoming slowly more available its use was still nevertheless an extremely rare phenomenon in Britain. Indeed, even after the sharp increase in the number of heroin addicts known to the Home Office between the late 1960s and early 1970s there were no more than 3000 registered addicts (Stimson and Oppenheimer, 1982).

Until the early 1970s there had been no strong association between heroin use and any particular social group, although in relation to other drugs such as cannabis and LSD • with the emergence of the 'hippie' life-style there was a strongly middle-class and student emphasis. With the exception of the use of various pills by working-class 'Mods' — 'bombers', 'blues' and 'purple hearts' — the British drug scene could still be largely summed up as 'Bohemian' in social orientation.

Through the 1970s the heroin problem in Britain largely stabilised, with a tendency for the proportion of newly notified addicts under 21 years of age to drop steadily through these years (Hartnoll, 1984; Home Office, 1984). From the mid-1970s barbiturate misuse became increasingly common among younger drug users, although this caused surprisingly little social concern except among specialist professional groups, but as the 1970s wore on there was also a gathering together of a variety of social problems such as housing difficulties and unemployment in combination with problem drug use as youth unemployment began its slow creep upwards (Dorn and South, 1985; Jamieson et al., 1984).

Sudden changes then overcame patterns of drug misuse in Britain, with the number of known addicts increasing threefold between 1979 and 1983 (Home Office, 1984). There was also a new style of drug use, of course, involving young people in some of the UK's battered working-class housing estates who began to experiment with the novel practice of smoking, 'chasing' or `toZning' heroin. As this became popular from the early 1980s onwards, then for the first time in the history of heroin misuse in modern Britain there were clear associations between heroin and unemployment.

The watershed years were between 1979 and 1981, when from all the available evidence the heroin habit really began to take off in some of the towns and cities in Scotland and the north of England whereas previously it had been largely confined to London. Observable signs of a rapid increase in heroin use were first noted in Glasgow, for example, in 1981 (cf. Ditton and Speirits, 1981). Whereas in Bradford, to take one other example, heroin first became available in any quantity in 1979 at the absurdly low street-price of £35-40 a gram, compared with £80— £100 in London at that time. Such was the novelty of the situation in a city like Bradford that an out-reach drugs project reported that among experienced drug users, 'Most people felt that cheap heroin was just a flash in the pan' (Fox, 1979).

These were, of course, also the crucial years in which unemployment increased at an astonishing pace, doubling from approximately 1.5 million to 3 million people in the space of two years between 1979 and 1981. And as unemployment continued to increase through the 1980s, in spite of repeated attempts by the government to massage the figures by changing the basis on which the statistics were assembled, so the problem of heroin misuse continued to grow.

What, if any, were the associations between these twin phenomena of the early 1980s? At a macro-statistical level it has recently been shown that there is a close association between national trends of rising drug misuse and rising unemployment (Peck and Plant, 1986). Nevertheless, in my view it would be a mistake to infer from these statistical correlations that heroin misuse is directly caused by unemployment, or that the problem of heroin misuse can be blamed on those government policies which flowed from Margaret Thatcher's disastrous 'monetarist' experiment which has ripped the heart out of so many of our industrial towns and cities where heroin use is now so prevalent. The relationships between heroin use and unemployment are less direct than that. Indeed, at a national level they might even be described as 'accidental'. This is because the increase in h9roin misuse was only made possible as a result of the influx of high-quality heroin in cheap and plentiful supply from the late 1970s onwards from Iran and Pakistan, so that the developments which made heroin more widely available at precisely the same time that domestic unemployment began to rise sharply were, at quite a vital level of argument, simply coincidental.

Even so, if the macro-correlations between levels of unemployment and heroin use might merely indicate an 'accidental' relationship between the two phenomena, evidence of a different kind is beginning to accumulate which shows an indisputable link between unemployment and heroin misuse at a local level. What I hope will also emerge from my subsequent argument is that high levels of unemployment make it much more difficult to build effective strategies in order to combat heroin misuse. This different kind of evidence, which shows that there is a tendency for heroin misuse to be concentrated in localities which are also suffering from high levels of unemployment, emerges both from our own research in the north of England and also that of Howard Parker and his colleagues on Merseyside (Parker et al. , 1986; Pearson et al. , 1986). And it is more focused, neighbourhood-based studies such as these which are beginning to throw up a number of difficult questions about the relationship between unemployment and heroin misuse which point in quite different directions from the blanket assumptions which underlie the kind of macro-statistical analysis which I have already mentioned.

Before trying to unravel these relations in more detail, it is first as well to emphasise once more that there is no mechanical relationship between heroin and unemployment, whereby unemployment leads inevitably towards an increased risk of heroin misuse. We know that heroin has sometimes spread like wildfire in depressed, run-down council estates in cities such as Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool and elsewhere. Nevertheless, in some of the most socially deprived parts of the British Isles, such as Belfast and the north-east of England, heroin misuse is a rarity. Why? The simple answer is that the single necessary condition for the spread of drug misuse is an established distribution system — and without local availability heroin misuse, rather obviously, will not be found to be correlated with unemployment or any other social variable. And at the moment the extent to which heroin distribution systems have effectively penetrated the British Isles is extremely variable, so that one finds at the moment that the heroin problem is extremely scattered and localised. Thus, in some areas of high unemployment one dges not find heroin misuse, whereas in others one does find dense pockets of the problem.

In the north of England, one aspect of this localisation is that there is less of a problem to the east of the Pennines than to the west. This is not to say that heroin misuse is unknown to the east of the Pennines — whether in the West Yorkshire conurbation of Bradford and Leeds, around Sheffield and Rotherham in South Yorkshire, the port of Hull, or some smaller and more remote towns. However, one does not find the highly visible and densely concentrated heroin networks which can be found to the west of the Pennines in some parts of Manchester and Merseyside, in a number of other towns in Lancashire and Cheshire, or in Carlisle towards the Scottish border. Moreover, where the availability of heroin is reduced in the east there is a tendency for its street-price to be that much higher than in the west. And in an area such as South Yorkshire it was agreed by all reliable sources during the summer of 1985 that something like 50 per cent of opiate use in the region consisted of illicit pharmaceuticals rather than imported heroin — which points once again to the weakness and inefficiency of the heroin distribution systems, as well as to previously established patterns and preferences of opiate misuse within the local drug culture (cf. Pearson et al., 1986).

Substantial regional variations such as these can only really be understood in terms of distribution and supply mechanisms. We can identify even more detailed, fine-grained variations in drug availability at neighbourhood level whereby even in a town or city where there is an extensive heroin problem, the drug might be readily available in one neighbourhood but not in another. This was found in our research in the north of England, and also in Lee O'Bryan's recent research in London where he found that there might be a pattern of heroin use on one council estate, and yet the drug would not be available in an immediately adjacent neighbourhood (O'Bryan, 1985a).

In Parker's study on the Wirral, which involved a detailed and sophisticated calculation of prevalence rates for problem drug users, the prevalence of heroin use varied sharply between the different townships which constitute the region. These rates were correlated with a number of indicators of social deprivation including unemployment levels, showing a dominant tendency for high levels of heroin misuse to be associated with high levels of social deprivation. For a small number of townships tkese correlations did not hold; there was a serious heroin problem in some relatively affluent areas, and in one area of high social deprivation the level of drug misuse was low. However, the relatively prosperous areas with high levels of heroin misuse were found to be in close proximity to townships with high levels both of heroin misuse and unemployment, suggesting that in these areas geographical proximity had assisted the effective working of the local drug distribution networks, whereas the area of high deprivation with low drug misuse was geographically remote (Parker et al. , 1986). This particular finding from the Wirral study is especially valuable because it offers a compact illustration of how the spread of heroin misuse results from a number of interwoven factors. While the problem tends to be most densely concentrated in areas of high unemployment, it can also become a serious problem in a more 'affluent' locality if that locality has developed a distribution network. Nowhere is immune, but the social map still tends to indicate that social deprivation and heroin misuse are in some way linked.

We can begin to see in a preliminary way how the relationship between heroin and unemployment is not a simple, one-to-one connection. Rather, it is characterised by a high degree of local complexity. Even so, whatever the precise mechanism of these relationships, where heroin misuse has become a serious problem in recent years, those same neighbourhoods are likely to suffer from a number of other problems such as poor housing, low income, a high density of single-parent families, and unemployment. This is what needs to be explained.

The way in which I shall set about attempting to offer an explanation will be on three fronts. First, I will show why socially deprived neighbourhoods so often seem to provide a home for drug distribution networks. Second, drawing largely on North American experiences, I will examine some of the ways in which unemployment might act as an encouragement to experimentation with heroin. Third, I will discuss something of what is known about the social and personal consequences of unemployment, principally in terms of the social psychology of unemployment and how this might help us to understand why heroin misuse coheres with the life-style of the unemployed. Taken together, while, these strands of evidence might not support the view that heroin is the Ideal' drug for the unemployed, because in the long run it almost certainly exacerbates people's living difficulties rather than improves them, it will go some way to showing that the unemployed are 'ideal' for heroin.

Neighbourhood studies: unemployment, housing and heroin

One aim of our research in the north of England was to identify a small number of neighbourhoods where heroin misuse had become a serious problem, and to see whether these localities differed in any other significant ways from the surrounding area. For example, we were interested to learn whether these localities would show any identifiable pattern in terIns of the age structure of their local population, the nature and standard of the housing stock, the proportion of single-parent families, or in terms of other 'social indicators' such as overcrowding, household access to a motor car and, of course, local unemployment levels.

On the basis of information from relevant public agencies seven neighbourhoods were identified, although our independent enquiries subsequently established that two of these did not in fact have an extensive heroin problem — this was merely feared and rumoured by local people and by local professionals, who typically projected their anxieties onto housing estates that already had poor local reputations as 'problem estates'. It is probably fairly common that people tend to imagine that such 'problem areas' suffer from every conceivable kind of difficulty and it is often through such processes of negative stereotyping that such localities gain their local notoriety (cf. Reynolds, 1985; Gill, 1977). I will return to this question of local stereotyping at a later point.

For those neighbourhoods where a local heroin problem could be identified, a mass of detailed information was brought together from various public agencies such as housing departments, social services, the probation service, police and planning departments in order to understand the problems faced by residents in these areas. The Small Area Statistics of the 1981 Census proved quite invaluable, offering a measure of local conditions particularly well-suited to our purposes because heroin had started to become locally available in 1981 or thereabouts. Heroin users and ex-users were also contacted and interviewed in each of these localities, and extensive contacts were made with a variety of professional and voluntary bodies.

The chosen neighbourhoods varied in a number of respects. Of the original seven, two were medium-sized council estates built in the inter-war years and with poor local reputations, whereas two others were large post-war 'overspill' estates with a mixture of housing stock which included flats and maisonettes as well as conventional housing. Some were parts of large urban conurbations, while others were in smaller towns, and one of the chosen localities was a typically run-down high-rise development in an inner-city location. In all cases the large majority of the housing stock was publicly owned, and to all outward appearances these neighbourhoods were no different from innumerable other council estates dotted across the length and breadth of the north of England.

The thing which stood out, however, is that each of those neighbourhoods with a heroin problem was also experiencing unusually severe levels of social deprivation and unemployment.

In 1981 the national unemployment rate was approximately 12 per cent, but in these lodalities it varied from 23 per cent to 34 per cent, with even higher levels among young people under 25 years of age. On average, somewhat more than two-thirds of households did not have access to a motor car, and in some areas almost one-third of all households contained a single-parent family. These were, then, decidedly poor working-class neighbourhoods.

The Small Area Statistics of the Census enable us to take an even more locally focused view of the pattern of social deprivation in these neighbourhoods. The smallest unit of the census is the Enumeration District (ED) which will cover approximately 200 households in an urban area, and by using the ED statistics as 'building blocks' it is possible to generate a statistical profile not only of an overall housing area but also of particular sub-locahties within the area, down to a small number of streets or a particular block of flats. When ED levels of the census are examined in this way they reveal dense pockets of exceptional poverty and social neqd (cf. Pearson, 1986). Social deprivation does not cast its shadow evenly across a single town or city, nor does it spread itself uniformly across even a single housing estate. Poverty and unemployment tend to dwell in small huddles of a few streets, and we were able to map these sharp local gradients for our identified neighbourhoods and to match these against 'target areas1 where the local heroin network was at its highest density (see Table 3.1).

The results suggest a close local relationship between heroin misuse and neighbourhood levels of social deprivation and unemployment. For example, the 1981 unemployment level of 16 per cent in the north-west region rose to 23 per cent in one Merseyside town and to 34 per cent in its electoral Ward of Docktown. Then, in a locality defined by two Enumeration Districts (EDs) within the area, unemployment rocketed to 53 per cent with 60 per cent of young men under 25 years of age out of work. These two EDs described a high-rise development which was notorious for a variety of social problems, and which had now also become the home for an even more notorious heroin-dealing network. One ex-user from this neighbourhood described for us a typical daily scene in the corridors and stair-wells of this high-rise development:

* All unemployment rates refer only to male unemployment. Female unemployment statistics tend to underestimate the extent of unemployment because of non-registration.

t 'One-parent families' refers to the statistics in Table 31 of the 1981 Census. In Table 27 another estimate of single-parent households is offered which describes those households with children and one lone adult'. Table 27 gives a substantially lower estimate on all counts, but Table 31 is generally thought to offer the better estimate because it includes also single parents who might share a household with kin, other families or friends.

NOTE: Each named locality (Moorside, Closefields, etc.) refers either to a specific neighbourhood or electoral ward. Each 'Target area' refers to a sub-locality within that neighbourhood or ward where a specific heroin network was at its highest density. The statistical evidence, generated from the Enumeration District level of the Small Area Statistics of the 1981 Census, shows a gathering concentration of social deprivation within each Target area.
SOURCE: Pearson et al., 1986.

You go in the area, like, and there's about . . . at the most about six people selling it there like, you know, it's like a market. You walk in, 'You're after gear?"Don't buy his gear, buy mine!"Here you are, mine's the best bags, here y'are look at these!"Fuck off, I've seen 'im first!' And all that, like. That's what it's like as you walk by. Like a big market stall.

This area had long been notorious because of structural and design problems which had led to damp in bedrooms and mould on the interior walls of the flats, as well as excessive heating bills for residents. Waste-disposal facilities had long since failed to operate properly and the area had entered that well-known spiral of decline whereby the majority of families were anxious to leave and only those with the most urgent and desperate housing needs werp prepared to consider moving into the flats. It had become a 'hard-to-let' area, and as the proportion of empty and boarded-up household units increased, so the pressures on local residents increased. Also, significantly, the heroin problem began to take root.

The same spiral of disrepair was in evidence in the other localities, with particular streets or blocks of flats within the larger area suffering from the same 'hard-to-let' syndrome and with heroin misuse and its sustaining dealing networks tending to cluster within this smaller and more disadvantaged huddle of poverty. The ways in which multiple problems tend to gather together in this way in certain public housing estates has long been recognised, inviting a familiar controversy as to whether housing allocation policies which use certain estates (or small parts of them) as 'dumping grounds' for difficult tenants lie at the back of the downward spiral of morale and the concentrations of a variety of social problems (cf. Morris and Morris, 1955; NACRO, 1975; Gill, 1977; Reynolds, 1985; Coleman, 1985). It will invariably be denied by local housing departments that they operate such policies. But whether as a result of housing allocation policy or not, once a poor reputation is established this image will tend to be reinforced by selective news stories in the local press and by local gossip. As its 'hard-to-let' reputation intensifies, making it increasingly less likely that families will wish to move into the area, this leads to even more dense concentrations of residents with the most urgent housing difficulties. The likelihood of squatting' will also increase, as the proportion of vacant dwellings and boarded-up properties increases, and for those residents unfortunate enough to live in what will by now have become an area of considerable notoriety there will be a variety of knock-on effects: such the inability to obtain hire-purchase facilities or television rental once one's address is known to the relevant credit company.

In one area within our study, `Moorside' in Greater Manchester, a local tenants' group complained bitterly about these kinds of difficulties. Indeed, one of the things which they most disliked and feared about the arrival of heroin in their neighbourhood was that it would simply bring about a further worsening of the estate's reputation. There was also a substantial elderly population on this estate, and a local general practitioner confided that the main impact which the heroin problem had had on his workload was not dealing with drug users, but the heightened fear and anxiety among elderly residents occasioned by local rumour and the possibilities of drug-related crime. Tear of crime' is, of course, something to which old people are particularly vulnerable (Maxfield, 1984).

There is an awful predictability about the ways in which the history of a 'problem estate' unfolds, as increasing numbers and varieties of difficulties crowd together. The same pattern emërges once again, with a number of points of local difference, in Frances Reynolds's study of the 'Omega' estate in the Midlands, summarised here by Alice Coleman (1985, p. 91):

It gained its bad name from its initial associations, in 1957, with 'immigrant' workers from Wales, Scotland and Ireland and other parts of England, and also from the largely mistaken belief that slum-clearance tenants had been dumped there. Once labelled as a problem, the estate was unable to escape this image . . . its reputation is reinforced by exaggerated press reports of any incident associated with it. Some tenants say they are ashamed of giving their addresses, as they feel that the name of the estate disadvantages them in job applications or obtaining normal services. The estate has become the least popular in the city among people seeking council accommodation and, according to Reynolds, it is often the most desperate and disadvantaged people that accept dwellings there.

Having established, then, that there is nothing particularly unusual about those neighbourhoods which fell within our study of the heroin problem, we can take the argument one step further. Given the nature of housing markets, it does not require a declared housing allocation policy to produce the downward spiral of the 'hard-to-let' estate once this is set in motion. Rather, the very fact that it will only be those with the most desperate housing needs who will be prepared to move into such an area will itself further intensify its multi-problem character. Such people will include single-parent families, women and their families who have been subject to domestic violence and who are trying to place some distance between themselves and their violent spouses, together with the young homeless and others who command the least power and influence within the housing market. Equally, people with drug-related problems also tend to have a variety of social difficulties, including housing problems, so that they will be subject to precisely the same pressures of the housing market — a point argued forcibly by Dorn and South (1985) in their study of London 'street agencies' and the problems which their clientele face. The London drug scene, as they show, was profoundly influenced by the deterioration of the housing supply during the 1970s, with a particularly sharp squeeze in the private rented sector which had previously been a major resource for young people in London.

The dense clustering of social problems which we have found, including the association between local unemployment levels and heroin misuse, is therefore at least in part a consequence of the effects of the housing market and housing policies on poor and disadvantaged people. However, the fact that these market pressures bear upon problem drug users in much the same way that they do upon one-parent families does not only mean that one gets dense concentrations of different potential client groups within the same area. It also follows that the presence of problem drug users will increase the local availability of drugs. In the case of heroin, at the lowest level of the distributions chain we find those user-supplier or user-dealer networks in which roles are subject to change on a periodic basis: today it is this person who has a surplus who supplies to that person; tomorrow this person is short and secures his or her drugs from that person. 'User-dealers' or 'user-suppliers' are not just users who also happen to deal in order to support their habits. Drugs circulate at this lowest level essentially among friendship networks, within which there is a mutuality of interests and the roles of 'buyer' and 'supplier' are frequently interchanged. So that the presence of drug users in a locality makes it highly likely that the low-level dealing networks will establish themselves within the area. The easy availability of housing in 'hard-to-let' areas, together with the presence of unoccupied dwellings which invite squatting, thus act as major encouragements for the possibility that drug-dealing networks will emerge. Indeed, the most common form of user-dealer network that we encountered in our northern research was precisely someone doing business from the front room of his or her council house in a run-down area of a run-down estate. The open-market style of 'street dealing' mentioned earlier, which is reminiscent of North American 'copping areas', was in our experience highly exceptional — although there will often be neighbouring public houses and clubs where it is possible to 'score' drugs.

The complex pattern of ways in which social disadvantage works itself out within the confines of the housing market thereby have important consequences in terms of heroin's availability, with the increased likelihood that it will become more available at 'street level' in areas of high social disadvantage. Availability, as I have argued, is crucial to the dissemination of any pattern of drug use. But availability cannot in itself explain why people choose to use drugs. Availability can only lay the basis for the possibility of choosing to use a drug. And so the next question that we must ask is, what happens once heroin becomes available within a locality? And does unemployment play any part in the drug choices that people will make?

Activity or passivity? Messages from North America

The association between a high density of local heroin misuse and high levels of social and economic deprivation has been noted many times before, particularly in North American ghettos where there is a much more extensive and iong-standini narcotics problem than in Britain. In attempting to account for these links, one dominant form of explanation has been to invoke the idea of heroin use as an 'escapist' or `retreatise activity: a flight into inactive phantasy in the face of a harsh world which promises little or nothing by way of material achievement.

This is a view which holds both a common-sense appeal, as well as drawing some authority from certain traditions within theoretical sociology and criminology. On the side of common sense, Pete Townshend of The Who has recently put it this way:
have often said, and many agree with me, that the high unemployment figures among young people in this country must be contributing to their growing use of oblivion-creating drugs' (quoted in Maden and Wallace, 1986). Whereas it was from the theoretical work of Robert Merton (1938 and 1957) that sociologists developed their own directly comparable 'escapist' theories of drug misuse. For Merton, while theft and property crime were to be viewed as Innovative' means by which people delivered the promised goods of the American Dream through illicit acquisition, forms of deviance such as drug use or 'hobo' life-styles were grouped together as `retreatist' adaptations by which people opted out of the challenges of the good life, neither attempting to earn the promised goods through honest toil nor aspiring to obtain them through illicit means.

Robert Merton's vast influence in North American sociology and crjminology meant that this became a traditional line of thinking in the post-war years, subsequently reworked and reinforced by Cloward and Ohlin (1960) who understood involvement in drug cultures as a 'double failure' both in the world of licit and illicit acquisition. Delinquent subcultures, as they described them, could be divided on lines of specialisation. There were 'criminal' gangs in ghetto neighbourhoods in which there was opportunities for recruitment of young men into adult criminal activities, and where such gangs centred their activities on gainful theft and robbery. Then, in the absence of such opportunities, there were 'conflict' gangs whose preoccupations centred upon territorial gang fighting. But finally, for those young people in slum neighbourhoods who were involved in neither criminal gangs nor fighting gangs there were the `retreatist' options of drug misuse.

In their study of delinquency and narcotics use in New York in the 1950s and early 1960s, The Road to H, Isidor Chein and his colleagues also adopted an 'escapist' perspective in trying to explain why there was a concentration of heroin misuse in areas of urban deprivation. It was suggested that young people in such neighbourhoods were more likely to experiment with narcotics because the 'conditions of economic squalor may generate a sense of hopelessness from which narcotics offer at least a temporary, if illusory, escape' (Chein et al., 1964, p. 78).

However, this view of drug misuse as a passive, escapist activity subsequently came to be challenged by a significant body of research within North American criminology, much of it concerned with the Chicago and New York heroin epidemics of the late 1940s and 1950s. A more active view of the heroin user's life-style was developed, both in terms of the pursuit of pleasure and status, by Finestone (1957) and Hughes et al. (1972) who described in similar terms how the Chicago heroin epidemic which peaked in 1949 had been associated with the 'cool' life-style adopted by young black 'cats' in the context of the emerging modern jazz culture of Chicago's black south side. The penalties for heroin possession were not severe at this time, and much less severe than penalties for marijuana possession, and as Hughes et al. (1972, p. 995) describe them, 'young addicts of the 1940s were hip, street-wise, non-delinquents'.

From San Francisco, Sutter (1966) also failed to support the idea of a passive and retreatist drug subculture, describing instead an elaborate status system within which the supreme status was afforded to the 'righteous dope fiend' — the successful addict rarely seen in either hospitals or clinics, who could even be something of a local hero. Feldman's (1968) research, based on fieldwork in Boston and New York, offered further credibility to the view of an active addict-life-style with its detailed accounts of how narcotics served as a means by which 'action-seeking' youth in slum neighbourhoods could demonstrate their claims to manhood and also claim status as a 'stand-up cat'. And then at more or less the same time, undoubtedly the most explicit departure from the 'passive', `retreatise view of heroin use was offered by Preble and Casey (1969) from New York, where the street-addict was described as a resourceful entrepreneur, engaged in a flurry of economic activity which required him to remain 'alert, flexible and resourceful' in order to 'take care of business' successfully.

In Feldman's account of the world of 'action-seeking' slum youth, status as a 'stand-up cat' had been commonly achieved through being adept at thieving and fighting, thereby facing and overcoming various challenges to one's emerging manhood. However, heroin came to be a most effective form of challenge precisely because of its fatal notoriety. Whether the 'stand-up cat' was prepared to accept the challenge, and whether he would then be able to use the drug without succumbing to addition and dependence, could become a crucial test of manhood in some poor districts. 'Are you man enough to take it?"Can you control it, or will it control you?' These were a much more mortal form of combat than a street-fight. Indeed, Feldman went on to suggest that once the challenge had been accepted then the experience of heroin might itself transform what it meant to be a true 'stand-up cat'.

Where the stand-up cat was admired for his bursts of hot hate, the new image ideal is admired for his coolness. Instead of brutality and physical strength, the new drug user prefers to be seen as slick and clever. Fighting becomes an unprofitable choice of behaviour, unless it involves access to drugs . . . He starts to lose his belief that walking away from a fight will make him a 'punk' or a 'faggot' . . . He simply believes, finally, that fighting is silly, very uncool especially when his 'high' can be achieved — so he thinks at this stage of his career — with far less risk to life and limb (Feldman, 1968, p. 137).

Preble and Casey described a similar transformation of the delinquent life-style in New York during the 1950s, as heroin became increasingly available, involving once more a shift from the 'tough' fighting image to the 'cool' and resourceful drug-user image:

The more street-wise teenagers learned about it and prevailed upon the experienced users to introduce them to it. Contrary to popular reports, experimentation with heroin by youths usually began at their initiative, and not through proselytism. The stereotype of the dope pusher giving out free samples of narcotics to teenagers in school yards and candy stores in order to addict them is one of the most misleading myths about drug use. Also, contrary to professional reports about this development, it was not the weak, withdrawn, unadaptive street boy who first started using heroin, but rather the tough, sophisticated and respected boy, typically a street gang leader . . . By 1955 heroin use among teenagers on the street had become widespread, resulting, among other things, in the dissolution of fighting gangs. Now the hip boy on the street was not the swaggering, leather-jacketed gang member, but the boy nodding on the street corner enjoying his heroin high. He was the new hero model (Preble and Casey, 1969, p. 6).

The likelihood that it would be opinion-leaders within neighbourhoods and friendship networks who were the first to experiment with heroin was also noted by Patrick Hughes and his colleagues in Chicago, again showing how status enhancement and attempts to emulate people with high local status is a powerful motor in the local dissemination of heroin habits (Hughes et al. , 1971 and 1972; Hughes and Crawford, 1972; Hughes, 1977). Their case studies of local drug epidemics adopted an approach which drew explicitly on earlier critiques Of drug misuse as a `retreatist' activity, and showed vividly how rapidly heroin can move within a friendship network. The notion of the 'pusher', again, was seen to be an irrelevance in understanding local drug networks. Indeed, as one begins to grasp the centrality of friendship and systems of local loyalty in shaping drug choices and preferences of life-style, a number of the stereotypical views of heroin use can be seen to be not only irrelevant but positively harmful. If it were not for the fact that friendship is the essential lubricant of drug exchanges, for example, then it is unlikely that heroin would be able to establish itself so quickly in a neighbourhood once it becomes available: the fact of friendship makes it more likely that the initial offer will be accepted than if it were offered by a stranger or a 'pusher' (cf. Pearson et al., 1986; Pearson, 1987a; Bennett and Wright, 1986; Moore, 1977). The central drift of this argument is also that it makes little sense to think of heroin use as 'escape':

The user turns to drugs, not as a result of anomie, but rather to capitalise on a new mode of enhancing his status and prestige within a social system where the highest prizes go to persons who demonstrate attributes of toughness, daring and adventure.

Within the life-style of the stand-up cat, movement into heroin use is one route to becoming 'somebody' in the eyes of the important people who comprise the slum network (Feldman, 1968, p. 138).

These North American responses to the heroin epidemics of the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s suggest a quite different interpretation of the links between heroin misuse and social deprivation than that which assumes that heroin is the 'ideal' drug of the unemployed because it promises oblivion. Rather, it is more helpful to think of drug misuse as offering a means of status-achievement to people who live in working-class neighbourhoods where they are deprived of the traditional means of demonstrating status through work.

This view is given further support by more recent British and North American research which suggests that it is not only more fruitful to think of the development of heroin networks in terms of what they contribute to local status systems, but also to the local economy (cf. Auld et al. , 1984 and 1986; Johnson et al. , 1985). John Auld and his colleagues have suggested, for example, that within the flourishing system of perks, fiddles and minor thefts which constitutes the so-called 'irregular economy' or 'hidden economy' in so many localities, heroin simply becomes one more commodity with an exchange value. It also offers — as they acknowledge from the work of Preble and Casey — the possibilities of an exciting and exacting life-style. Indeed, the importance of these insights from New York in the late 1960s has now been amply demonstrated by the major research into heroin-abuse crime in central and east Harlem (Johnson et al. , 1985) which shows how even at its lowest levels of street distribution, drug networks involve a myriad of exchange values both in terms of drug-dealing and drug-related crime. In a detailed fleshing-out of the Preble and Casey thesis, the street addict emerges as someone who is engaged in prolific economic activity, albeit within an illicit economy, with an average yearly cash-flow for the Harlem street-user of approximately $25 000 per year. Perhaps the most astonishing thing to come through in this research, however, is what the authors describe as the 'jarring realisation' that 'from a purely economic standpoint, heroin-abuser criminality is not all bad. In fact, although crime victims sustain important economic losses (not to mention non-economic considerations such as fear of crime, anger, frustration), more persons gain than lose' (Johnson et al. , 1985, p. 184). This comes about because of the way in which stolen goods are offered for sale at only a small proportion of their normal price, thus enlarging the purchasing power of poor families and helping to sustain the 'vigorous demand for stolen goods in ghetto economies':

Moreover, our heroin abuser's theft had indirect effects on society by increasing monetary wealth in the licit economy. Victims bought replacements for the stolen goods, stores transferred shoplifting losses to consumers, and the government gained added sales-tax revenue. The licit economic system indirectly gained about $6,000 in additional economic values that would not have been realised had the heroin abuser not stolen merchandise . . . We are not claiming that heroin-abuser theft is good for the economy or society, only that many individuals benefit while fewer have specific, definable losses (Johnson et aL , 1985, pp. 184-5).

By comparison with New York the heroin scene in Britain is in its infancy, although it should not be imagined that the extraordinary economic scenarios drafted by Bruce Johnson and his colleagues are entirely irrelevant to the British experience and refer only to the wilder side of Harlem street life. The British heroin market, as described most recently by Lewis et al. (1985) is not yet characterised by the extraordinary division of labour described in Harlem, with its legion of different roles in the low-level distribution system — 'street dealers', 'jugglers', 'lieutenants', `drop-men', `steerers', 'taste faces' and 'bag followers' (cf. Preble and Casey, 1969; Johnson et al. , 1985; Rosenbaum, 1981). Even so, the economic consequences of an established heroin network within a locality can be quite considerable. Here is an ex-user from a deprived area of Merseyside, for example, describing how user-dealers that he had known operated in his neighbourhood:

They'll buy a gram, which'll cost 'em from £60 to £75. Now what they'll do is cut £70 worth, say, into £5 or £10 bags. The rest of what's left of the gram is their smoke for the day. They go sell that £70 worth of gear . . . well, that's enough for the next gram. And so on. You see, not making any money, but just supplying their habit sort of thing . . . Doing that, you know, from day to day like.

This is undoubtedly one of the lowest levels of a heroin distribution network, describing the 'typical' activity of a user-dealer or user-supplier through which no surplus profits are made; and where the aim is simply to supply one's own habit. Viewed in one light it is simply a hand-to-mouth 'subsistence' economy. If this activity is viewed economically from a cash-flow viewpoint, however, then it takes on a rather different complexion — whereby if this person were able to sustain his £70 daily transaction for a full year, it would represent an annual cash flow of £25 000. It would still be true that he would not be making any cash profit out of this low-level business, and would remain as poor as a church mouse. Nevertheless, it takes little imagination to see that in a socially deprived area with high unemployment levels, an annual cash flow of £25 000 is a phenomenal achievement. With something like £500 per week passing through his pockets, such a young man would be likely to be a figure of some real local standing. There would always be a little spare cash around. He would be the man to know if you wanted to score a 'bag' (of heroin), because even if he did not have any heroin immediately available he would possess a sound working knowledge of the local scene. Indeed, whether you prefer to think of him as a 'resourceful entrepreneur' in Bruce Johnson's terms or as an abject victim of the heroin traffic, locally he would undoubtedly be 'Jack the Lad'.

Life on the dole: killing time and creating meaning

Having seen how the North American experience suggests that it is not helpful to think of experimentation with heroin as an 'escapist' activity, I now wish to suggest that heroin use can nevertheless offer a sort of 'solution' to some of the problems experienced by people who are unemployed. The pharmacology of opiates, for example, is often described as one which offers a 'cushioning' effect against the world, and which 'takes all your worries away'. But once a pattern of addictive heroin use has been established, the user's life begins to circle around the overriding preoccupation of avoiding withdrawal symptoms. And this new worry, of supporting a 'habit', insists on an extremely active life-style — thereby dictating an aim and purpose in life, helping to cement the relationships between heroin misuse and those people whose lives have become aimless through unemployment.

In order to explore these new dimensions of the relationships between heroin use and unemployment, however, it will be helpful to forget about heroin for a moment and to focus on the lives of the unemployed. People, that is, who are not using heroin, and who are not involved in any other kinds of serious drug misuse, but who find themselves without work and without the prospect of paid employment in any foreseeable future. What is life like on the dole?

A great deal of rhetoric by politicians repeatedly suggests that unless something is done about mass unemployment, .and in particular youth unemployment, then there will be more inner-city riots, more youthful hooliganism, more vandalism, and so on. Maybe this is true. Although the more obvious fact about the actual lives and experiences of the unemployed is not that unemployment produces restlessness and riot, but that it leads to apathy and despair. This was the experience of the 'Great Slump' of the 1930s, just as it is today. Which is not to say that there were not serious riots among the unemployed in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, because there were — then as now (cf. Pearson, 1983 and 1987b). Even so, a typical 'day in the life' of an unemployed person in Britain today will be characterised more by a listless apathy than by revolt. Unemployment defines people as worthless and robs them of vital props to status and self-esteem. The ways in which identity is bound up with the job which someone does are many-sided, and this is particularly so among the male working-class where the skills of a bricklayer, the manly strength of a labourer, the resourcefulness of a car mechanic, are highly-prized social attributes. This is not to say that unemployment does not have its own demoralising effects on women. We know from Brown and Harris's 1978 study The Social Origins of Depression that a lack of employment outside the home was one of the factors which made it more likely that a woman would suffer from depression. But we actually know far much less about the specific effects of unemployment on women, just as we know much less about the lives and drug careers of female heroin users (cf. Griffin, 1985; Rosenbaum, 1981).

Policy discussions on unemployment often focus only on material and financial considerations, and although these are not unimportant a variety of social and personal consequences flow from what we can usefully think of as the social psychology of unemployment (cf. Jahoda, 1982; Jahoda et al., 1938; Zawadski and Lazarsfeld, 1935; Pearson, 1987c). I have already touched upon the loss of status and identity, and people also lose a range of social contacts which come through their engagement with the workplace. Correspondingly, there is a tendency to lose interest more generally in external affairs. In one of the classic studies of the 1930s, Marie Jahoda's analysis of the impact of the Slump on the Austrian cotton town of Marienthal, it was found that unemployment had a surprisingly wide variety of knock-on effects. It resulted, for example, in a sharp decrease in the likelihood that someone would read a newspaper or use a library, even though these were facilities being made available to the unemployed at reduced cost, and there was a corresponding decline in other involvements with the external world such as political organisations and clubs. Diet and health were also subsequently affected, and a large body of evidence now indicates a clear relationship between unemployment and a variety of physical and mental ill health, as well as the increased likelihood of suicide (cf. Hakim, 1982). A more subtle effect which emerged with particular clarity in the Marienthal study, however, was the impact which unemployment had on the experience of the passage of time, in that unemployment seemed to have the effect of destroying the habitual time structures by which we order so much of our everyday life (Jahoda et al., 1938).

Those of us fortunate enough to be in work will often curse these same time-structures — the need to get up every morning at the same time, to catch the same bus or train, to clock in and clock out at certain hours, to work to the strict timetable of the factory or the office, and so on — which are experienced as a burden and a strain. And so they are. But if these routine time-structures are suddenly removed, through unemployment or retirement, then people are often left feeling bewildered and rudderless. One of the findings of the Marienthal study was that everything seemed to take twice as long for unemployed men as it did when they were in work. It was observed that people even walked at a measurably slower pace in the streets. And yet, equally, although these men had so much time on their hands they seemed quite unable to meet deadlineg effectively, and their wives would complain that they seemed unable to turn up punctually at meal times. It was as if without a routine time-structure which broke up the day, time and the passage of time became quite meaningless.

This is not, of course, some kind of 'natural' phenomenon. Rather, it is an aspect of our culture in which since the urban and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries time has become dominated by the requirements of factory and office routines and time-clocked work (cf. Thompson, 1967; Simmel, 1950; Reid, 1976). Whereas in the pre-industrial world the most significant passages of time were those dictated by the seasons (sowing and harvesting) and the natural rhythms of the sun, moon and tides, we have now become so accustomed and socialised into our own habitual time-structures that these present themselves to us as if they were 'natural' and we find it difficult to cope without them. Marie Jahoda suggests that the unemployed are required to carry a 'heavy psychological burden' resulting from 'the destruction of a culturally imposed time-structure'. Moreover, 'to blame the unemployed for their inability to use their time in a more satisfactory way . . . would amount to asking that they single-handedly overthrow the compelling social norms under which we all live and which provide a supportive frame within which individuals shape their individual lives' (Jahoda 1982, p. 23).

The experience of the dislocation of routine time-structures will undoubtedly differ for people who have been in different kinds of employment, from different social classes, and also between men and women. Among other important occupational and regional variations revealed by detailed study of daily routines of activity and time-allocation, gender differences are undoubtedly central (cf. Parkes and Wallis, 1978; pp. 83-7). For women engaged in full-time work as housewives and child-carers, for example, we might expect that they would be less affected by the removal of time-structures imposed by external employment — and this was the experience in Marienthal. Within the busy round of shopping, cooking and cleaning there are some fixed landmarks within domestic labour (getting the children up, getting them off to school, preparing an evening meal, bed-time, etc.) but time is relatively unstructured. There is nothing to say that dishes should be washed before shopping, or that beds should be made before visiting the launderette, etc. Even so, the fact that many women will devise quite rigid timetables by which to order the day reminds us of how important it can be to have one's day guided and informed by supporting time-structures. One less obvious way of building some structure into a woman's day is suggested by Hilary Graham's (1976) study of smoking during pregnancy, whereby smoking a cigarette can become a means of marking out time to oneself — 'getting your feet up' — amidst an otherwise demanding round of household and child-care responsibilities.

What I now wish to suggest is that heroin use within the contexts of unemployment can take on a new significance, as an effective resolution of the problem of de-routinised time-structures. Dependence on heroin, quite literally, imposes its own rigid time-structure involving a necessary cycle of events if withdrawal sickness is to be avoided. In his formal ethnography of heroin use, Ripping and Running, Michael Agar describes the formal sequence of events necessary in order to sustain a successful heroin habit in terms of the 'central events in the life of a street junkie':

The three were hustle (obtain money illegally), cop (buy heroin) and get off (inject heroin) . . . A junkie hustles to get bread (money); he cops to obtain stuff (heroin); and he gets-off to get straight (not-sick) . . . The outcome of hustling is bread, which is a prerequisite for copping. The outcome of copping is stuff, which is a prerequisite for getting-off. The outcome of getting-off is to be straight, which is a prerequisite for hustling. The three events are logically linked together between the outcome of one and the prerequisite of another (Agar, 1973; p. 21).

This same cycle of events was described to us repeatedly, albeit in less formal language, in interviews with heroin users and ex-users in northern cities. The rhythm of a heroin user's day was often described as if it were dictated by the beat of a metronome, of getting up, hustling for money, buying heroin, smoking it, and then hustling for the next bag:

Like you get up, you've gotta go out, get your money, get your smack, come back, use it . . . You're alright for ten minutes, go back out again, get money . . . you're turkeying after a couple of hours, can't get nothin', whatever, back out again . . . (Colin, 23 years, Manchester).

'What was your typical day like?'

Yeh just get your gear, smoke it, and then . . . wonder where you'll get your next bag from and watch a bit of telly, well that's it . . . that just makes you realise and you start thinking 'God, what am I gonna do for tonight now?' . . . So, like, you try and go and get more money, and that like, so your whole day's just taken up . . . Go and do whatever you do for your money, buy your gear, get back, by then like . . . you smoke it . . . then tea-time comes around (Sharon, 21 years, Merseyside).

When I, when you're hooked on it like, you don't want to' go robbin' until you had a toot like, 'cos you can't run or nothin' if you got grabbed by the busies [police]. You wouldn't be able to leg away, and that, like. So you'd have a toot to get your head together and then go out mooching (Eddie, 21 years, Merseyside).

These busy cycles of activity were commonly experienced as all-consuming preoccupations. So much so that if and when someone attempted to 'come off ' and 'stay off ' heroin, the question of how to break from the routine and replace it with a new and different pattern of daily activity could be experienced as a more difficult obstacle to overcome than actually withdrawing from heroin. In common with many other accounts of ex-users, 'coming off ' was seen as relatively easy compared with 'staying off ', and it was sometimes felt that the problem of 'staying off' was made all that more difficult by the absence of employment possibilities which would be able to supply both alternative routines and rewards:

It just seems the hardest thing in the world to stay off smack . . . like I say, I've been off it a week, more than a week, but you go back on it 'cos it's round here, you know . . I think, like, unemployment and that has got to do with it . . . with nothing to do, I'm sitting here, like, doing nothing . . . I'm not trying to blame anyone else like, but I'm bound to start thinking of smack again (Jack, 22 years, Merseyside).

Getting out of the little rut you've been in for the last, y'know, 12 or 16 months or whatever . . . You know, getting up in the morning, going down for your gear, or getting up and finding some money to get your gear . . . smoking the gear, what have you . . . It's just the actual boredom, you know, sitting in the house . . . Like when I do come off, I just stay in the house . . . just hibernate sort of thing . . . just stay in and become a fucking hermit and that (Paul, 24 years, Merseyside).

It takes time, 'cos for two-and-a-half years like, all you've been interested in is getting a bag . . . getting a bag . . . and you get used to that. That's a routine for you like. So . . . (Eddie, 21 years, Merseyside).

On the one hand, these daily routines of a heroin habit can be seen as a dismal compulsion from which the user cannot escape. But at the same time they offered to people meaningful structures around which to organise their lives in an eventful and challenging way. In the absence of competing routines and structures of meaning and identity, such as might be supplied by work commitments, we can then say that it will not only be more difficult to 'come off' and 'stay off' heroin by breaking out of its routines and replacing them with alternative patterns of daily activity. It will also be more likely that a novice user will establish a pattern of habitual heroin use in the first place. Heroin is not instantly addictive, and it is necessary to work quite hard at becoming a heroin addict: that is to say, the drug will need to have been taken regularly on a daily basis for some length of time before the onset of dependence. Different time-scales are undoubtedly involved for different individuals in making the transition from early experimentation and occasional use to habitual use, but it seems highly likely that this transition will be accelerated where there are no c,ompeting claims on the user's time and attention, such as the possibilities of work commitments. And saying this is to imply more than that 'the devil makes work for idle hands'. Rather, it is an issue that bears very directly on what is known of the conditions necessary to sustain a pattern of occasional heroin use on an experimental, recreational basis for any length of time.

The question of occasional heroin use is little understood in contemporary Britain, but in North America where occasional opiate use on a recreational basis is known within the drug culture as 'chipping', research by Norman Zinberg and his colleagues has established some of the ground-rules which enable people to sustain non-addictive patterns of opiate use over long periods of time (cf. Zinberg, 1984). Basically, it is necessary for the occasional user to adhere to strict rules on the frequency of use, so that the drug is only used on certain occasions and never on consecutive days, which itself implies access to a knowledgeable network of controlled drug users who can offer advice to the novice. Zinberg's research also shows thg non-compulsive heroin use is more easily sustained where there are other valued commitments in a person's life such as employment, family responsibilities and recreational pursuits which conflict with regular opiate use, together with a circle of friendship which includes non-users as well as users.

Other research confirms this general impression that occasional intoxicant use is more easily sustained, without leading to compulsive use, where there are competing claims in a person's life. Stanton Peele, for example, takes the view that the social—psychological basis of addictive experiences is more important than their physiological components, suggesting that people become addicted to experiences and not to substances. Compulsive behaviour, he points out, is commonly associated with practices such as gambling, food intake, or even the pursuit of physical fitness. What distinguishes controlled opiate users from compulsive users, on this view, is that they 'subordinate their desire for a drug to other values, activities and personal relationships, so that the narcotic or other drug does not dominate their lives. When engaged in other pursuits that they value, these users do not crave the drug or manifest withdrawal on discontinuing their drug use' (Peele, 1985, p. 8).

In Britain a smaller study by Blackwell (1984) identified similar features in the life-styles of controlled opiate users, while also noting the way in which people often moved between different statuses of involvement with heroin. Occasional users sometimes felt that their heroin use was drifting out of control towards dependence, whereupon they took action to regulate their involvement with the drug. Among the motivating factors mentioned in this context were 'loss of appetite, irregular sleep patterns, needle marks and spotty complexions', whereas 'two respondents said that they stopped using in order to get into shape for the football season' (Blackwell, 1984, p. 228). What is remarkable about these accounts is that, given the common view of heroin as a totally enslaving preoccupation, such trite reasons as 'getting into shape for the football season' could provide sufficient incentive to become abstinent.

The overall impression created by this body of research on controlled opiate use is that if occasional use is to be sustained over time, then there must be other commitments in a person's life which compete with the claims of heroin. If such commitments are either absent or not valued, then the work of Zinberg, Peele and others would suggest that stable patterns of recreational heroin use would not be commonly found within a drug-using community. Thus in an area of mass unemployment, one might expect that heroin misuse would quickly assume a pattern of epidemic growth once it becomes available in a locality simply becauge of the absence of any realistic promise of work commitments which provide a major means by which people in our culture fashion self-esteem and a meaningful identity. Indeed, when asked why she thought that some people seemed to be able to use heroin occasionally without becoming dependent whereas other people did not, the mother of an ex-user from an area of high unemployment in South Yorkshire offered an admirable impromptu version of the Zinberg—Peele thesis in the following terms:

Don't you think you've got to put it this way? People what are working, if they've got good sense, they've got sommat good to look out for. They're not gonna tek it, are they, through t'week when they're going to work. Whereas you get somebody what's in't unemployed, they'll have it at weekend and they'll continue wi' it, cos they got nowt else to do have they? Because you do get sensible people like that, don't you, if they're working they just . . . they'll not bother wi' it through t'week. Well that's how I see it.

And that, basically, is how I see it too. The relationships between heroin use and unemployment work on a number of levels. First, the gathering together of a potential for heroin misuse in areas of high social deprivation is determined by the mechanism of the housing market which brings together people with only the most urgent housing needs, including problem drug users, in run-down 'hard-to-let' areas of our towns and cities. By this means heroin can become available within a locality, with the potential that the drug comes to be used within a local friendship network on an experimental basis. A major encouragement to such experimentation is that in the absence of other effective means by which to establish meaningful lives and identities in areas of mass unemployment, a willingness to face the challenge of heroin can become a means by which to achieve local status, with every indication that the first people to use the drug within a locality will be opinion-leaders. The promise of small monetary gain, or at least the status of being someone 'in the know', further enhances the likelihood of heroin involvement as the drug establishes itself as one of a variety of commodities in circulation within the local hidden or irregular economy. In the absence of any other sustaining life commitments within such a neighbourhood it is then all the more likely that patterns of occasional use will pass over into habitual use more quickly than they would under different circumstances. Finally, the life-style of the heroin user with its necessary and exacting daily routines can not only appear to 'solve' what Marie Jahoda has called 'the heavy psychological burden' of unemployment caused by the dislocation of habitual time-structures, but the conditions of mass unemployment make it all the more difficult for heroin users to quit these routines and to establish alternative patterns of daily activity that are both meaningful and rewarding.

Once such a position has been arrived at, and by the mid-1980s it had already begun to arrive in some of the deprived neighbourhoods of British towns and cities, it then requires one final grim step to acknowledge that the situation in the ghetto districts of New York in the late 1960s, described by Edward Preble and John Casey, has become almost an adequate description of heroin misuse in unemployed Britain today. Noting the dominant tendency to view heroin use as 'an escape from life', theirs was an utterly explicit rejection of such a viewpoint. Indeed, in the ghetto contexts of economic and social disadvantage, they were more inclined to see the heroin user's hectic activity as a form of work:

Their behaviour is anything but an escape from life. They are actively engaged in meaningful activities and relationships seven days a week. Tile brief moments of euphoria after each administration of a small amount of heroin constitute a small fraction of their daily lives. The rest of the time they are aggressively pursuing a career that is exacting, challenging, adi/enturous and rewarding. They are always on the move and must be alert, flexible and resourceful. The surest way to identify heroin users in slum neighbourhoods is to observe the way people walk. The heroin user walks with a fast, purposeful stride, as if he is late for an important appointment — indeed, he is'. He is hustling . . . trying to sell stolen goods, avoiding the police, looking for a heroin dealer with a good bag . . . coming back from copping . . . looking for a safe place to take the drug, or looking for someone who beat [cheated] him — among other things. He is, in short, taking care of business, a phrase which is so common with heroin users that they use it in response to words of greeting, such as 'how you doing?' and 'what's happening?' Taking care of biz is the common abbreviation. Ripping and running is an older phrase which also refers to their busy lives. For them, if not for their middle-and upper-class counterparts (a small minority of opiate addicts), the quest for heroin is the quest for a meaningful life, not an escape from life. And the meaning does not lie, primarily, in the effects of the drug on their minds and their bodies; it lies in the gratification of accomplishing a series of challenging, exciting tasks, every day of the week (Preble and Casey, 1969, pp. 2-3).

To be realistic, policy proposals in relation to heroin should take into account the ways in which those people who live in deprived areas have evolved a variety of ways of getting by, including illicit economic activity and leisure activities, that fit the material conditions in which they live. Economic policies have a bearing here. While government policy may not have directly caused the heroin problem, a policy which tolerates scandalously high levels of unemployment makes it much more difficult to solve. Indeed, I think it highly unlikely that it will prove possible to contain the spread of heroin misuse, let alone curb it, until policies are adopted which offer to young working-class people realistic opportunities to obtain effective financial rewards and to fashion meaningful identities and life-styles through work and access to decent housing.