Book of the month Heroin Addiction Care and Control: the British System

‘The plain truth is that there is no British System’, said John Strang and Michael Gossop in 19941. For a considerable time, people have debated what constituted the British system of drug treatment and control. The term is generally taken to mean the approach that operated from the 1920s to the 1960s but perhaps the British system is one of those things that you don’t know you have until it’s gone. Over the twentieth century, treatment for an initially small number of addicts changed from private care, which could involve detoxification or the prescription of heroin or morphine, to the entrance of NHS practitioners, and then, as the number of drug users increased, the removal of treatment from primary care and into new specialist health service treatment centres. Initially these clinics prescribed injectable heroin and methadone, but, under the leadershi