ABSTRACT
“Empty hands” have been a problem since the earliest stages of industrialization. All those drifting around were seen as creating at least two types of troubles: one by their potential for unrest, the other through the dissonance between the enforced life-style of unemployment and the official morality of industriousness. The large-scale dealers from the middle- and upper-classes do exist, even in the prisons, but as rare exceptions. As the other side of the pincers movement, we see initiatives to establish coercive cures. A special prison was built, where people arrested for drunkenness in the streets were warehoused for long periods under the pretext of treatment for alcohol problems. Later developments have only increased the reasons for a war against drugs. The gaps between classes, even in welfare states run by social democrats, are clearly widening. Newcomers among the unwanted are again seen as sick or at least without ordinary will-power due to their supposedly irresistible demand for drugs.
