1 SETTING THE SCENE

In 1967, when this story begins, I was not exactly a newcomer either to Soho or to the drug culture. My early acquaintance with problems of drug abuse had been in Stepney at the end of the 1950s when, as a student, I lived and worked in the notorious Cable Street district. Cable Street was a legend throughout the 1930s as the scene of anti-fascist battles, and throughout the 1940s and 1950s as a district of increasing violence. `London's Harlem' was the Press's term while Dr Michael Banton called his study of it in 1955 The Coloured Quarter. Both descriptions were inaccurate, for coloured immigrants comprised a small percentage of the residents of the Cable Street area. But it became popular as a social centre, especially for West African seamen, and there are colourful descriptions of it in writings by Roi Ottley and Colin MacInnes. As the social centre of the London Docks, Cable Street contained the centres of traffic in marijuana in the late 1940s, and it was here in 1958 that I first encountered pot-smoking groups. My early contacts were with merchant seamen from Sierra Leone and Gambia, and later with Nigerians and Somalis. At no time during four or five years in Cable Street did I come across heroin addiction. I went to help in a Franciscan mission there in 1958 and from then until 1961 I taught English to Somalis and helped in a club for African seamen and in a hostel for new immigrants. These were the years of Father Joe Williamson's energetic campaigns against the appalling slum conditions in the western part of Stepney. Cable Street was a slum cafe quarter with a great deal of cultural activity and a tremendous amount of human misery. The experience of living there was of incalculable help to me in my subsequent ministry in Soho.

In 1964, after three years in Oxford—at Trinity College and St Stephen's House—I was ordained Deacon and began to serve in the parish of the Most Holy Trinity, Hoxton, at the northern tip of the East End. Hoxton, the heart of what formed, until the London Government Act, the Borough of Shoreditch, was an area of settled population with the lowest mobility rate of all the London boroughs. Here lived families whose descendants had been there since the middle years of the last century. It was while I was working in Hoxton that my involvement with drug abusers grew and intensified, from three separate directions. The first was through two young heroin addicts in the parish who were in touch with a group of older addicts in North London, some of whom were Canadian refugees. These young heroin addicts were fairly untypical of Hox ton youth, most of whom were not acquainted with the opiates or any intravenous drugs. The second direction from which my contact with drug abusers came was the group of youngsters connected with a local experimental cafe project. Most of these, by 1964-5, were drug users, smoking cannabis and experimenting with amphetamines. Their sources of supply were Old Montague Street in Whitechapel, (one of my old haunts from Cable Street days) for cannabis, and the West End clubs for pills. Then, thirdly, I found that I was regaining contact with old friends in the Cable Street scene, some of whom had become heroin addicts during the years in which I had been away. Derek Cox, an exceptional youth worker, had come to work in Spitalfields soon after I had left, and he was closely in touch with the cafes in Old Montague Street and Brick Lane to which many of the old Cable Street clientele had moved.* Hoxton was midway between the drug traffic area of the East End and that of Islington, and during 1965 and 1966 I found an increasing number of young addicts coming my way.

There were two people at this time who were most aware of, and in close touch with, the new addict society in the East End: Derek Cox, and Geoffrey Buckland, then a curate at Christ Church, Spitalfields. Christ Church was a Hawksmoor edifice whose rebuilding caused heated controversy in 1964. But its clergy were more concerned with human beings than with buildings, and the Crypt was opened as a rehabilitation programme for crude spirit alcoholics. These alcoholics gathered round Commercial Street and Fournier Street and in 'Itchy Park' (Christ Church Gardens) which, since the nineteenth century, had been a centre for the homeless derelicts. The drug takers were mainly found a little further to the East, in Brick Lane and the streets which ran off it. Old Montague Street in particular was a major distribution centre for cannabis and amphetamines. Very few East End doctors, however, were involved in the prescribing of heroin, and the emerging group of junkies in the Whitechapel and Spitallields districts were getting their prescriptions from a doctor in West London. It was not difficult to trace the early spread of heroin addiction in the East End, through person-to-person infection, to the prescribing of this doctor. In 1966 the East End Drug Dependency Group was set up under the chairmanship of Dr C.R.B. Joyce, Reader in Psychopharmacology at the London Hospital Medical College. Dick Joyce played a very important co-ordinating role in bringing together workers in different disciplines in the East End who were concerned with problems of drug abuse. As a pharmacologist and psychologist, he was in a unique position at the London Hospital to act as a bridge between the medical and psychiatric world, and that of youth workers, social workers and others who were involved with the street addict.

In November 1965 the Second Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Drug Addiction—the Brain Report—was published. Its main conclusion was that a small group of physicians in London was responsible for the epidemic of heroin addiction (paragraph 11). The Report continued: 'The evidence further shows that not more than six doctors have prescribed these very large amounts of dangerous drugs for individual patients, and these doctors have acted within the law and according to their professional judgment' (paragraph 12). It recommended (paragraph 22) the setting up of specialized treatment centres in the London area 'as soon as possible', and the limitation of prescribing of heroin for addicts to doctors on the staff of such centres (paragraph 26).

I felt then that the report was both naive and superficial in its analysis of drug addiction, and hopelessly narrow in its terms of reference. Paragraph 40 was the work of a genius: 'Witnesses have told us that there are numerous clubs, many in the West End of London, enjoying a vogue among young people, who can find in them such diversions as modern music and all-night dancing. In such places it is known that some young people have indulged in stimulant drugs of the amphetamine type.' In these words the whole complexity of the pill scene in Soho was digested into two sentences whose sentiments can only be described as archaic in the extreme.

As a result of the publication of the Brain Report I wrote a letter to The Times in which I expressed some of the fears of those of us who were working within the drug scene.

The actual phenomena of drug traffic receives hardly any treatment in the Report: the word 'pusher' does not appear throughout its pages. A whole dimension has thus been omitted. The 'escalation' thesis, that the use of cannabis may lead to addiction to hard drugs, is mentioned, and you, Sir, in your leader of November 25th point out that 'progression from amphetamines and marihuana to heroin addiction can. . . be quicker than the ill-informed may realize'. But in neither case is it pointed out that one reason why this may happen is that in many places the pushers of both types of drug are the same people.

I do not now believe this statement to be true, though there was some evidence for its truth in 1965. In the early days of growth of drug cultures, cannabis, amphetamines, and heroin might be found in close association in the illicit traffic. But as the distinct drug-using groups emerge, this association ceases to apply. Today the sources of supply for cannabis and heroin are quite different, and the pushers are not the same. The argument for escalation by social contact does not therefore stand up to analysis.

However, it was an argument which, in common with other observers, I put forward at this time. On 7 March 1966 I gave a lecture on adolescent drug abuse in a London University extra-mural course. During this I referred to the dangers of involvement of cannabis and heroin users in a common subculture. Most teenagers who smoked pot did not progress to heroin, but, I argued, where progression did occur, it was due to social factors. I suggested therefore that there was a strong, if not an overwhelming, case for legalizing cannabis, in order to cut the link which leads to heroin and to incalculable human misery.

The following day the lecture was reported in The Times under the headline, 'Make marijuana legal, says curate'. On 9 March, Dee Wells delivered a violent and excited attack on me in the Sun, in which she accused me of being starry-eyed and ignorant of reality. Her article was a fairly good example of the kind of irrationality and hysteria which discussions about cannabis aroused, and still arouses, and it included a number of the popular misconceptions about the drug scene. 'Marijuana may be innocent. But it leads to heroin', she protested with indignation. I still find people quoting garbled versions of that lecture at me. An accurate version of the relevant sections of it was printed in Alan Bestic's Turn Me On Man (1966) and it looks very mild today, but at the time it brought considerable abuse, anonymous letters, and angry attacks from many sides.

In November 19661 wrote a further letter to The Times which was again given prominent position, on 9 November under the headline, 'A year after the Drugs Report'. From both official and non-official sources, I later learnt that the impact of this letter was far greater than I had anticipated or realized then. In the letter I drew attention to the lack of official action as a result of the Brain Report.

The Minister of Health's notorious statement of August 2nd about treatment centres was received by doctors, social workers and addicts with cynical laughter or with despair. Those who daily face the problems of the young drug-taker are finding the obstacles almost insurmountable: hours and days spent ringing round hospitals for admissions; refusals, evasions, and interminable delays; addicts whose condition deteriorates and parents whose hearts are broken; doctors who refuse to prescribe, and doctors who prescribe with almost criminal irresponsibility; and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and despair among those who know the drug scene closest.

I went on to point out three areas in which changes had occurred in the year since the Report.

First, the widespread reluctance and refusal of GPs throughout London to prescribe heroin and cocaine, even under carefully controlled conditions, coupled with the opting-out of several well-known doctors, has led to a worsening state of affairs.

The small group of 'junkies doctors', whose names and addresses are known to everyone working in the field, have inherited a situation which is now beyond control. While some medical sources have dried up, others have exploited the situation.

Secondly, it was inevitable that, given the post-Brain situation, the black market would develop. The latest report from the Home Office to the United Nations comments (paragraph 3 7) on the 'significant increase . . . in the numbers of addicts who have obtained their drugs entirely from unknown sources.' The same report insists that 'the illicit traffic in narcotics . . . is not extensive in the United Kingdom,' but how long will this remain the case?

The patients in the Salter Unit at Cane Hill Hospital, in their critique of Brain, warned that 'there is already in the wings, waiting its opportunity, the efficient and well-tried Mafia organization, eager to exploit a situation in which heroin is difficult to obtain.' There is no doubt that criminals have already moved into the black market in drugs, and many experts warn of the likelihood of professional syndicates on American lines trying to take over the controls.

Thirdly, while the relative absence of any 'drug subculture' is a characteristic of the English scene most frequently seized upon, this is becoming less true every day. The underworld is spreading to embrace kids on the 'pot and pills' fringe, spreading into new areas geographically, spreading socially and economically through sections of working-class urban delinquency.

The situation can be exaggerated and distorted, but it is serious enough. What is to be feared is that official reaction will be repressive and negative. So far, the results of the Brain Report have been almost entirely negative and bad. Since Brain, the situation has got worse, not better. And perhaps most frightening of all is the fact that many of our best workers in the areas of infection are coming to feel that they are banging their heads against a brick wall. Paralysis, like addiction itself, grows like a cancer and destroys.

This letter coincided with the disappearance from the heroin scene of a well-known GP in West London, and on -_ 15 November, The Times published a letter from Dr A.J. Hawes, in which he drew some ominous conclusions from recent happenings:

One of the prominent 'junkies' doctors' has just thrown up his addicts' practice in the past few days. I cannot blame him, but the result has been to throw about eighty heroin and cocaine addicts on the open market which usually means the black market. In the past forty-eight hours I have had ten new applicants for supplies, whom I have had to turn away from my door—most regretfully.. . . The most threatening portent is that addicts are telling me that there is plenty of the stuff to be had on the black market even though the source from over-prescribing doctors is drying up.

It looks as if big business which has been waiting in the wings for so long has now taken over the stage and is playing the lead. So we may look for an explosion in the teenage addict population as the months go by.

A few weeks later, on 8 December 1966, I published a lengthy article, 'Danger on the Drug Scene' in the Daily Telegraph, in which I expanded some of the points made in the letter.

The Brain Committee was extremely narrow in its terms of reference, and its members had very slight knowledge of the drug scene. Only in paragraph 40 did it touch on the social aspects, and this was in language so archaic and naive that it reduces not only addicts and doctors but intelligent teenagers wherever it is read to hysterical laughter. What has happened in the year since Brain? At the official level, almost nothing. On August 2nd the Minister of Health, replying to a Commons question, said that 'there are already centres for the treatment of addicts, and more beds would be made available if the demand increases.' In a private letter to me dated August 19th the Ministry claimed that 'there are thirty or so hospitals in the London area which accept drug addicts for treatment.' These statements are ludicrous misrepresentations of the truth as anyone knows who has ever tried to get one addict into hospital: evasions, equivocations, and interminable delays are the order of the day, while the addict's condition deteriorates and his family are heart-broken.

Although I did not realize it then, these words were to be the beginning of a long campaign to obtain more satisfactory treatment facilities.

* For a good account of Derek Cox's work, see his A Community Approach to Youth Work in East Lando n (19 70).