Preface

Social policies find few laboratories, even metaphorically, to test them: when a major social problem has been attacked in two countries from two almost opposite approaches—as the problem of narcotics addiction has been attacked in Great Britain and the United States—a comparison of the results ought to be instructive. Yet until now the facts about narcotics addiction and narcotics policy in Great Britain have been hard to come by; they have often been misreported, still more often distorted or misunderstood. In London, in the late 1960s, where I was working as a correspondent, I frequently read American reports about the British epidemic of heroin addiction and repeatedly found myself throwing down the newspaper or magazine in annoyance at what seemed to be simple, fundamental, chronic errors of fact. The irritation would not heal. Eventually, I proposed to write an article of perhaps ten thousand words to set the facts straight. Of course, the facts were less simple than I had thought, and their consequences more ambiguous; and it soon turned out that people's attitudes are the most fundamental facts of all about drug addiction and the policies that purport to deal with it. Ambiguities and attitudes, though, sometimes resist direct statement and must be allowed to convey themselves. The article, when it ran in The New Yorker in September and October 1973, was nearly four times the length originally planned. It has grown by a third again to book form: there was more to be said about the ways that British policy evolved in the 1920s and after the Second World War; some new research into addiction had been completed in England; and I was ready to press further, in a new part 3, the lessons that Americans can and cannot draw from the British experience. Drug addiction is a subject so raddled with misinformation that I have provided notes on sources, except for a few things learned from men who asked not to be quoted by name; it is pleasant to demonstrate that a report of this informal kind can be reasonably rigorous, but the most gratifying assurance of accuracy came from the director of a drug-addiction clinic in London who said that he asks new members of his staff to read the article as an introduction to their work. I remain unable to know whether I have changed any attitudes but my own or reached any but the most local conclusions; I'm confident at least that my original aim is satisfied, in that the elementary facts about narcotics addiction and narcotics policy in Great Britain have been mustered, and will be found to be present and correct.
A man to whom I had listened carefully while preparing this book contented himself after he had read the magazine version with observing, "In matters of science or scholarship I've always believed, of course, that ideas are common property from the moment one mutters them in one's bath." Perhaps, indeed, it's pretentious for an exercise in journalism to dress itself in charts and footnotes and grandfather's tail coat and play at being grown up into that world of science and scholarship; but one piece of the apparatus I welcome—this chance to thank the people to whom I tried to listen carefully, and whose ideas have therefore found their way in here. My debt to Griffith Edwards will be evident to every reader; though I spent too little time with him, and spent that time so engrossed that I came away with only a few pages of scribbled key words, almost everything he said to me about drug addiction appears somewhere within—supposing, that is, that I got it right. I owe a similar debt to Martin Mitcheson and Margaret Tripp. In New York, Graham Finney and Thomas Bryant told me who in England not to miss and what questions not to forget. In London, C. G. Jeffery and H. B. Spear, of the Drugs Branch of the Home Office, gave hours of time and yards of the knowledge they uniquely possess. And then so many people let me interrupt their work, offering so much information beyond what is attributed to them in the text, that there's no fair way to single out the contribution of each. I am very grateful, for interviews in England, to Thomas Bewley, Philip Connell, Max Glatt, Edward David Hill, Ian Pierce James, John Mack, Susan Norvill, Gisela Brigitte Oppenheim, and James Willis, all at addiction-treatment clinics, and to those of their clients who also talked with me; and to Don Aitken, of Release, Peter A. L. Chapple, of the National Addiction and Research Institute, Cicely Saunders, of St. Christopher's Hospice, Roy Jenkins, Home Secretary in 1968 and now again, Peter Beedle, at the Home Office, Dennis Cahal, Ian Jewesbury, Alan Sippert, and E. R. Bransby, all at the Department of Health and Social Security, Commander Robert Huntley, of the Metropolitan Police, David Hawks and Colin Roberts, at the Addiction Research Unit of the Institute of Psychiatry, Jasper Woodcock, of the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence, and Jim Zacune, of North Staffordshire Polytechnic; and for interviews in the United States, I want to thank Elmer Gardner, Ray Godfrey, John Kramer, Robert Newman, Charles Rangel, and James E. Wesley. Three other Americans, whom I first met in England and sought out again in the United States, made me understand what I had learned, and for that necessary service I salute Richard Blum, Daniel X. Freedman, and Norman Zinberg. William Shawn gave editorial support and criticism generously; I hope I learned something of his fastidious courtesy to the reader. I also want to thank, for information or good counsel, Irving Benjamin, Caroline Coon, C. P. Crow, Risa Dickstein, Sir Harry Greenfield, G. G. Halliday, Kenneth Leech, Andrew Schaffer, Maria Squerciati, Herbert Sturz, and the staffs of the London Library, the medical library at the New York Academy of Medicine, the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence, and the Cambridge University Medical Library. Some of those I've mentioned also read part or all of the manuscript, at one stage or another, and made essential corrections. So, too, did Helga Veblen, in the checking department of The New Yorker, who reinter-viewed as many of my informants as she could reach, and found a dozen other authorities as well—whom I also thank, and in particular David Musto, who spent hours on the telephone, combing out factual snarls in the account of the early history of narcotics control in the United States. Dr. Veblen was hampered by the fact that many people I had talked to were thousands of miles away, so that, against her better judgment, she was obliged to pencil in, next to paragraph after paragraph of her galley proofs, the reluctant notation "O.A."meaning, she said, that the responsibility for error was on the author. As, of course, for every paragraph, it is.

Meldreth, Cambridgeshire March 1974

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