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John Davis, The London Drug Scene and the Making of Drug Policy, 1965–73, Twentieth Century British History, Volume 17, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 26–49, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwi063
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Abstract
This article examines the developing drug scene in 1960s London and its effect in influencing drug policy and shaping the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act. It is argued that London was Britain's pre-eminent drug centre in the period. It contained a drop-out, hard drug scene around Piccadilly Circus and a much wider, rapidly growing, soft drug culture affecting the city's young, in all walks of life. Soft drug users practised an experimentation based on consumer eclecticism, from which cannabis emerged as the soft drug of choice. Hard drug users, meanwhile, were forced into increasingly dangerous attempts to reproduce the effects of injectable heroin after general practitioners were prevented from prescribing the drug, with often horrific consequences. It is suggested that the resulting impression that all drug use was unstable and dangerous reinforced in the official mind the belief that soft drug users would graduate to heroin, with its attendant risks. An unworkable proscription of cannabis was therefore maintained in the face of escalating use of the drug. In contrast to relatively successful contemporary attempts to educate the public in the dangers of tobacco use, an unenforceable commitment to prohibition led governments into alarmist claims about the dangers of cannabis use, which in turn left users sceptical towards genuine evidence of dangers associated with the drug.
