ABSTRACT
Drug addiction is, in many ways, a test case for a great deal of recent theory in criminology. Until very recently, it was possible to rest on the comfortable assumptions about the British “system” of treatment that were tied in with a detestation of the “criminalization” of addiction in America. This system has now been well and truly exposed as little more than masterly inactivity in the face of what was an almost nonexistent addiction problem. But at least its principle that addicts should be treated medically rather than outlawed was established and it is this that has led to the identification of the British “system” by some American reformers. But it is now impossible to say, as Edwin Schur did in his book Narcotic Addiction in Britain and America (and he was echoed by many 90British criminologists, myself included), that the absence of a black market, and the treatment instead of the punishment of addicts, was enough to keep the drug problem at an insignificant level. 1 If an embryonic black market now exists, it has emerged since the alarming growth of addiction and dependency among adolescents and young adults, which is in turn despite (or because of, according to the second Brain Committee Report) the availability of treatment by free prescription; and if young addict subcultures (which a few years ago were nonexistent) have emerged, it is again despite the legality of treatment. So it is now the case that American proponents of the so-called British system were hopelessly wrong and/or misguided? I think not, for the following reasons:
(a) As David Ausubel has pointed out (though with the intention of attacking the British system), “it is a fallacy ... to impute a causal connection between the method of control currently employed and the relatively low rate of addiction” (for example, in Britain a few years ago). 2 If that is the case, one could argue that the fallacy applies to imputing a causal connection between the method of control and the rising rate of addiction in Britain today. The method of control has a great deal of impact on the unwanted side effects of addiction, on the life-style of the addict, on the mortality rate of addicts, on the extent of drug orientation among addicts. But arguably, it has little to do with the emergence of an addiction problem that has to be accounted for by resort to sociological and psychological factors quite distinct from the method of control. The rate of growth of addiction therefore (despite the Brain Committee) has a great deal to do with the state of adolescence and perhaps the state of the nation in the 1960s, with the growing competitiveness of the education system and the efflorescence of a highly stylized teenage culture, but having very little to do with the overprescribing by individual doctors. 3 The trend of current American theory is toward the view that most addicts go onto heroin (as they will do with hallucinogenic or “soft” drugs) with their eyes open. They may do so in the false belief that addiction can be delayed, or modified, or reversed more readily than they imagine at the outset; or they may do so in a consciously self-destructive way, partly spurred by the 91image of the addict as folk devil. The point is that they want the drugs and will obtain them from illicit sources if legal sources are unavailable. The question is why, not how, they begin to entertain the idea of themselves as addicts and progress from there to the state of addiction.
(b) The second reason why any move away from the principle at stake in the British system, so-called, should be vigorously resisted is that while the method of control cannot explain the growth of addiction, it is the major tool for minimizing the damage done once addiction is under way. Here, I am not thinking so much of the prospects of cure (though that must be in the forefront of medical and social policy) as of the implications for minimizing the unwanted side effects of the addict’s way of life—damage to job prospects, family life, the need to resort to crime, and so on. And, contrary to some current thinking, the method of control can arguably minimize the rate of growth of addiction (without necessarily preventing that growth from occurring at all) by lessening the distance between the addict and society, since the lesser the distance, the lesser the pressure to proselytize, to seek subcultural support of an intractably deviant nature. Peter Laurie has argued that the obverse occurs, and that, in America, a policy of repression has driven the addict underground into an intensive addict subculture intractable in nature but at least not growing in size. 4 On the last point, of size, I think that the American figures are still so suspect that no conclusion based on them can be sound, and there may well have been a hidden incidence of growth not amenable to police recording, especially among the middle class. But I would accept Laurie’s conclusion that, even if a more tolerant policy leads to a larger number of addicts than would otherwise occur, but of a less intensive kind than under a system of punitive response to the addict, then we have gained in the long run.
