ABSTRACT
The author's involvement My involvement, as a member of the Home Office Drugs Branch Inspectorate, was during the period 1952-86, which saw two significant changes in the character and scale of the British drug abuse problem. The first of these was the emergence in the early 1950s of a small group of young heroin addicts, who differed in many respects from the heroin addicts of the pre-war period (Spear 1969); the second was the development during the 1980s of a criminal illicit traffic in heroin of a type hitherto unknown in the United Kingdom. It is with the first of these that this chapter is primarily concerned, a change which was linked to serious deficiencies in the British System. These deficiencies, were not to be rectified until 1973 and are usually ignored by those who, for various reasons, are keen to claim that the British System, or what is occasionally misrepresented as the 'British experiment with the supply of heroin to addicts', has failed. This was a fascinating, if frustrating, period made even more interesting because in 1952, when I joined the Inspectorate, its two senior members, the Chief Inspector, F. R. ('FT') Thornton, OBE, and his Deputy A. L. ('Len') Dyke, had both been involved in drug control and enforcement before the war and knew that 'scene' intimately. 'FT' had the unique distinction of having been involved since 1917 when he was transferred to the Home Office from the Board of Trade where he had been engaged in the issue of export licences for opium and cocaine under the Defence of the Realm Regulations. On the other hand Len Dyke, who held the Chief Inspector's post from 1956, when 'FT' retired, until 1965, brought a different perspective as he came to the Home Office in 1941 from the Metropolitan Police, where, as a Detective Sergeant, he had been the force's first specialist drugs officer.
