Script doctors and drug cultures: the prescribing of controlled drugs to addicts 1916-66 (360G-Wellcome-096640_Z_11_Z)

The research I am undertaking traces the development of the heroin-using subculture in London from its beginnings on the Home Front of the First World War to its established form in the early 1960s. The project, primarily a work of cultural and medical history, entails an exploration of the conditions of possibility for this emergence: legal and medical controls, and new cultural norms promulgated by the popular media, each played a prominent formative role. It was against these forces that the subculture formed itself, seizing and redefining the pathologized, subaltern addict identity as the figure of the outsider in a conformist society. The subculture congealed around its own set of norms and attitudes, vocabulary, aesthetics, spaces, codes and rhythms. Both subculture and norm changed over time, each being redefined in relation to the other in an on-going historical process; these do not represent fixed, essential categories. 1. To explore the development of a heroin-using subculture in London, between 1916, when the Defence of the Realm Act or 'DORA' introduced the first serious legislative drug controls, and the early 1960s, when the subculture was firmly established as a distinct cultural grouping with its own style of life. 2. To delineate more precisely the role of the 'script doctor' in the fabrication of this subculture. The 'Script Doctor' is the prescribing doctor who pushes or transgresses the framework regulating the medical treatment of addiction.