ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the controls on drug users in Britain, especially as they operate through the treatment and care system. ‘The most important lesson of the British system is the lesson of pragmatism’. The British approach has never in practice been much like the coherent and self-contained orthodoxy it is imagined to be by overseas commentators. The contrast between abstinence-based and harm-minimisation policies formed the fulcrum of discussion. ‘Politics is the art of the possible’ said R A Butler, a leading post-war Tory politician. In the 1980s, despite this being seen generally as the decade of conviction politics, British drugs policy evidenced a sophistication of approach, a nice balancing of competing pressures, which indicated that the arts of negotiation and compromise remain central skills of the main players in this field. Partnership as the new mode of regulation appears at the end of our story as much in the drugs field as in other areas of British social policy.
