The new drug clinics of 1968: ‘Everything will be alright when the new place is built'

This is a personal memoir of the early days of the St Giles’ Drug Dependence Unit (DDU) which opened in south London in 1967.1 was its Director until 1976 when I left the NHS to work overseas. The clinic was one of the DDUs set up when the law was changed, limiting the prescribing of diamorphine and cocaine in the treatment of addiction, to physicians licensed by the Home Office.