had been exaggerated and there was no association with any significant moral or physical health problems. Hurrah! The British government had scientific justification for a fruitful policy of zero intolerance, which was to last another seventeen years.
When in 1912 the Americans eventually cajoled Britain into signing an international agreement limiting the opium and cocaine trades, the UK did so half-heartedly and with ministerial fingers secretly crossed. After all, it had sustained an empire by selling narcotics. If one had popped into Harrods at that time looking to purchase something ‘for when the nose is stuffed up, red and sore’, the assistant would probably have suggested Ryno’s Hay Fever and Catarrh Remedy. It consisted of almost pure cocaine. How about chocolate cocaine tablets for customers with a sweet but aching tooth? And what better way to support the boys at the front during the First World War than Harrods gift packs, containing morphine and cocaine?
It wasn’t until 1916 that the British government was convinced to take firm action. Ministers were worried that the use of drugs might be undermining the war effort, so the Defence of the Realm Act brought in Home Office controls on the unauthorised possession of opium and cocaine. It was Britain’s first embrace with prohibition, but this country did not share the passion for proscription that gripped the United States.
From among the federal agents recruited for America’s moral crusade against the evil drink in the 1920s emerged a man whose enormous enthusiasm for prohibition would go on to influence global drugs policy for the next forty years. His name was Harry J. Anslinger. Anslinger regarded the opium poppy as ‘the instrument of unprincipled men who by it satisfied their lust for wealth and power, of nations who used it for amoral reasons and as potent weapon of aggression’. He saw himself at the centre of an international struggle against ‘the narcotics evil’.
Under diplomatic pressure from the Americans to honour its obligations and toughen up its drug laws, the UK government decided to play for time by setting up a committee under the chairmanship of Sir Humphrey Rolleston, an eminent physician. The medical men around the table took a very medical view of the drugs problem, concluding after two years’ deliberation that addiction was a disease and an addict was ill. It was, therefore, the right of the medical practitioner to use his discretion in the choice of treatment in this, as in other illnesses. The pharmaceutical companies that manufactured prescription opium offered a silent prayer.
The US saw drug abuse as a sin; the UK had decided it was a sickness. Harry believed the answer was global prohibition; Sir Humphrey concluded the cure lay in the hands of doctors. What became known as the ‘British System’ was seen as a direct challenge to the prohibitionists on the other side of the Atlantic. There was due to be a showdown in Geneva in 1936; the Americans, with Anslinger in determined mood, demanded a new international convention that would oblige nations to introduce laws for severely punishing every aspect of the non-scientific drugs trade — from cultivation through production, manufacture, distribution and consumption. Anslinger’s philosophy had a totalitarian simplicity: ‘We intend to get the killer-pushers and their willing customers out of buying and selling drugs. The answer to the problem is simple — get rid of drugs, pushers and users. Period.’
When other delegates successfully argued that the proposed new sanctions should not apply to manufacturers or users, the United States went into a huff and refused to sign. The treaty was never implemented, but it was a turning point. The prohibitionists had changed the language of the debate.
Not that the Brits were particularly bothered. Drug abuse, they believed, was largely restricted to medics who had been trusted with the keys to the pharmacy, some wealthy bohemians, and a few foreigners with exotic habits. But after the Second World War, with more pressing matters on its mind and reliant on American aid to rebuild its battered economy, Britain was not looking for a fight over narcotics. Anslinger took his chance, incorporating prohibitionist steel into the structure of the new United Nations. When it came to international drugs policy, there would be a reduced role for doctors and greater influence for law enforcement officials.
Police in Britain took their cue amid post-war anxiety that ‘alien’ influences were contaminating the minds of the country’s young men. On the night of 15 April 1950, officers from Scotland Yard raided a nightclub on London’s Carnaby Street, looking for drugs. Club Eleven, now regarded as the crucible of modern British jazz, made headlines because the men found in possession of cannabis and cocaine were predominantly white, young and UK-born.
Six musicians spent the night in Savile Row police station before appearing at Marlborough Street Magistrates Court the next morning, among them future jazz legends Ronnie Scott and Denis Rose. Scott failed to convince the authorities that his cocaine was treatment for toothache, later recalling how one police officer told the court the arrests had taken place at a bebop club. ‘What,’ asked the judge gravely, ‘is bebop?’
‘A queer form of modern dancing — a Negro jive,’ came the answer.
The event helped confirm a growing establishment suspicion that illicit drugs were a cause of the impertinence seen in an increasingly disrespectful youth. Britain was struggling to understand the changes that were transforming the social landscape. Many old orthodoxies were being challenged, the sandbagged bulwarks of conformity in danger of collapse.
In the Home Office, officials were instructed to monitor the spread of heroin and in particular a new group of young users in London’s West End. Their dealer, a man called ‘Mark’, was arrested in September 1951 for theft from a hospital pharmacy. But what particularly concerned the drugs inspectorate was how this one pusher’s activities could be traced through to a wave of new addicts spreading across the capital. Heroin abuse was likened to a contagious disease infecting the young. By the time the 1950s careered into the 60s, Whitehall had become convinced that the use of dangerous narcotics was threatening the established order. The papers were filled with scandalised commentaries on the craze for ‘purple hearts’ (pills containing a mixture of amphetamines and barbiturates) said to be sweeping Soho dance clubs.
It wasn’t just a challenge for Britain. At the United Nations, attitudes were hardening and Harry Anslinger was on hand to encourage the worldwide community to sign the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which described addiction as a ‘serious evil’. It was an important victory for the prohibitionists, confirming in an international treaty that addicts were sinners rather than sick; drug abuse was a moral rather than medical problem. The British System now seemed quite at odds with the UK’s global obligations.
However, in London, a few so-called ‘junkie doctors’ were continuing to supply the vast majority of heroin users, their activities reported to and neatly recorded inside the Home Office. The drugs inspectorate noted that numbers, although still only in the hundreds, were rising fast and they were terrified at the prospect of criminal gangs muscling in on the growing drugs trade. One senior Home Office staffer, Bing Spear, took it upon himself to stand outside Boots the chemist on Piccadilly Circus at midnight as addicts picked up their prescriptions. If a user didn’t have a ‘script’, Bing would point them in the direction of a helpful doctor. Far better that, it was felt, than lining the pocket of some underworld pusher.
When a Whitehall committee investigated the escalating use of narcotics, they interviewed a psychiatrist who was known to prescribe heroin to some of her patients. After listening to her evidence, the chairman, Lord Brain, turned to the Home Office inspectors and said: ‘Well gentlemen, I think your problem can be summed up in two words — Lady Frankau.’
Lady Isabella Frankau, wife of the venerated consultant surgeon Sir Claude, is said to have almost single- handedly sparked the 1960s heroin epidemic in Britain. Records confirm that in 1962 alone she prescribed more than 600,000 heroin tablets to hundreds of users who flocked to her Wimpole Street consulting rooms.
Her patient list read like a
Lady Frankau’s motivation was to heal, but what was later described as her ‘lunatic generosity’ saw the end of the British System. As prescribing rules were tightened up, black-market Chinese heroin and other narcotics flooded in. Our relationship with drugs would never be the same again.
The 1960s throbbed with social upheaval and inter-generational tension. The Establishment was alarmed by the confidence and rebelliousness of the young — attitudes towards drugs became a divide and a battleground. In 1967, Marianne Faithfull was famously found under a fur rug, wearing nothing but a spacey smile, as the drugs squad busted a party and dragged Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Mick Jagger off to court. When The Beatles paid for an advertisement in
Home Office Minister Alice Bacon told the Commons of her horror at reading the views of Paul McCartney as she was having a shampoo and set. ‘Paul McCartney says among other things: “God is in everything. God is in the
