ABSTRACT
The history of the non-medical use of analgesic and psycho-active drugs is marked on the one hand by governmental, medical and judicial indifferenceparticularly in the nineteenth century-and on the other by frenetic activity in all these arenas. It is clear that we are, in historical terms, experiencing the second of these responses to drug use —near frenzied activity. Until the mid-1980s the ‘threat’ of the non-medical use of opiates, particularly heroin, lay in its potentially debilitating and dependency inducing effects on ‘youth’, particularly young working-class men and women on the country’s council housing estates (Parker, Newcombe and Bakx, 1987). Whether smoking or injecting the drug, the individual physical deterioration and negative social consequences (crime, unemployability) associated with widespread heroin use were considered selfevidently dysfunctional and to be prevented, discouraged and, for those found transgressing, punished by heavy fines and custodial sentences. A series of health education campaigns targetting young people began in 1985; the ‘Heroin Screws You Up‘posters were one of the more public expressions of government concern in this area. In 1987 there were 221 deaths in England and Wales registered as due to drug dependence or misuse. However, the decade has seen the appearance of a larger threat than drug use, and one which is associated with thousands rather than hundreds of deaths: AIDS.
