About the ultimate aspects of the drug problem, America and Britain are experiencing absolutely identical concerns. The fundamentals are common: it is only when those fundamentals are overlaid by the particular circumstances of a national scene that we are falsely led to believe that our two nations face an entirely different set of dilemmas. For instance, we have in common the need to delineate what we believe to be the causes of our drug problems, for those beliefs potently determine our policies: we must share therefore a vital concern to identify the nature and validity of causal assumptions. America and Britain may respond variously to this or that type of drug-using individual, but we both have the problem of determining how best to respond to the individual, and we share a confusion in often not knowing whether to respond to him as sick or as bad. We may sometimes seem to have different ideas as to the degree to which the state should in this area curtail the individual's liberty: we are identically concerned with the fundamental question of liberty.

—Griffith Edwards, addressing the Anglo-American Conference on Drug Abuse, sponsored by the Royal Society of Medicine, in London, 15-18 April 1973