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Drugs and Social Policy: The Establishment of Drug Control in Britain 1900–30
Author(s) -
Berridge Virginia
Publication year - 1984
Publication title -
british journal of addiction
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.424
H-Index - 193
eISSN - 1360-0443
pISSN - 0952-0481
DOI - 10.1111/j.1360-0443.1984.tb03837.x
Subject(s) - victory , bureaucracy , drug control , possession (linguistics) , politics , control (management) , law , social control , treaty , public administration , social policy , political economy , political science , sociology , economics , management , philosophy , linguistics
Summary The formation of drug control policy in Britain in the first three decades of the twentieth century is reviewed. Pharmaceutical controls over sales, based on professional self–regulation gave way to controls on possession and use during the First World War. These war–time restrictions were the basis of the 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act which fulfilled Britain's international treaty obligations. During the 1920s, the Home Office attempted to establish a penal policy on the American model; the Rolleston Report of 1926 established the ‘British system’ of drug control. The ‘political'significance of British drug control in this period, in particular its polemical use in the struggles to liberalise American drug policies in the 1960s, has inhibited a more developed analysis of policy. The tensions over policy and the 1926 Report were not simply battles between rival conceptions of control or a ‘victory’ for the ‘medical model’. This approach ignores the control aspects of both penal and medical views and the complexity of the interactions between them. The 1926 Report was not a ‘medical victory’ but/the result of an accommodation and collaboration between medical and bureaucratic elites with similar interests at stake.