ABSTRACT
Specialist drug clinics came into being as a response to the numerically small, although in percentage terms startling, increase in the number of young adults injecting heroin during the 1960s. Their supply of heroin came from the diversion of heroin prescribed to established addicts by a small number of independent doctors (Brain Committee 1965). These doctors never numbered more than six in London and were mostly working in private practice. An unknown proportion of their patients sold some of their prescribed drugs on the ‘grey market’ thus initiating others into the habit. In the absence of other means of controlling the prescribing of these doctors, and the subsequent diversion of heroin, the prescribing of heroin and cocaine to addicts was restricted to specially licensed doctors who worked at the new clinics which had been instituted at selected hospitals, mostly in London and including one private clinic. Effectively they became the only source in the UK of a heroin prescription for an addict.
