Script Doctors and Vicious Addicts: Subcul- Tures, Drugs, and Regulation Under the ’British System’, C.1917 to C.1960

Hallam, Chris (2016) Script Doctors and Vicious Addicts: Subcul- tures, Drugs, and Regulation under the 'British System', c.1917 to c.1960. PhD thesis, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17037/PUBS.03141178 Downloaded from: http://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/3141178/ DOI: 10.17037/PUBS.03141178 Usage Guidelines Please refer to usage guidelines at http://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/policies.html or alterna- tively contact [email protected]. Available under license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ Script Doctors and Vicious Addicts: Subcultures, Drugs, and Regulation under the 'British System', c.1917 to c.1960 Christopher Hallam Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of London July 2016 Faculty of Public Health and Policy LONDON SCHOOL OF HYGIENE & TROPICAL MEDICINE Wellcome Trust Research Expenses Grant, no. 096640/Z/11/Z Research group affiliation: Centre for History in Public Health 1 © Christopher Hallam, 2016 2 I, Christopher Hallam, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 3 Abstract This thesis focuses on drug use and control in Britain, and on the previously un-researched period between the late 1920s and the early 1960s. These decades have been described by one Home Office Official as the ‘quiet times’, since it was believed that nonmedical drug use was restricted to a few hundred respectable middle class individuals. Subcultures, inhabited by those whose lives centred on drugs, were thought not to exist. The thesis also engages with the historiography of the British System, named by US liberals to denote the medical approach to addiction in Britain in contrast to America. The research on which this thesis is based, however, including heretofore unexamined archives of the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police, indicates otherwise. It locates what is best understood as subcultural drug use, which, despite important differences, resembled and prefigured the hedonistic drug use of the 1960s. In order to understand subcultural use, one must explore its inception in the 1930s and the surrounding regulatory architecture, consisting of both medical and police functions. Utilising case studies, the thesis traces the interwoven development of two opiate networks, based respectively in Chelsea and London’s West End, the Home Office Drugs Branch, and the Chemist Inspection Officers and broader drugs work of the Metropolitan Police. In addition, it examines the ‘script doctors’ supplying the addict subculture, medical regulators such as the Regional Medical Officers and the General Medical Council, and the attitudes of prominent addiction specialists working on the 1938 Committee on Addiction of the Royal College of Physicians. The thesis conceptualises drugs as symbolic categories standing in for objects of social anxiety or promise, and over which social and cultural conflicts played out. These are 4 illustrated though the tensions between and within the drug control machinery and the nonmedical drug users. 5 Acknowledgements My first thanks and appreciation go to my Supervisor, Professor Virginia Berridge, who guided me patiently and with good humour through the long research process, and taught me to be a historian. My advisory committee, consisting of Professor Susanne MacGregor and Dr Alex Mold, provided valuable encouragement and advice. Dr Stuart Anderson provided me with a lucid account of the more technical relationships obtaining between the legislation and regulatory systems covering dangerous drugs and poisons. Pamela Ford, the Archive Manager at the Royal College of Physicians, was particularly helpful in unearthing the minutes of the 1938 Committee of Drug Addiction. A sizeable group of individuals were kind enough to permit me to draw on their expertise. They included Professor Dave Bewley Taylor, the Rev Ken Leech, Marek Kohn, Philip Hoare, and Philip Bottomley. Numerous others contributed in one way or another, as discussants, archivists, librarians, printers, barristas; and while most must remain nameless, my gratitude for their services endures. Finally, thanks go to my wife Michelle, daughter Gabriela, and grandchildren Eva and Lucas, respectively seven and five years old at the time of submission, who regularly came to inhabit my study, spinning on my chair and stealing my pens while I toiled at my desk. This text is dedicated to them. 6 Table of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………………….....4 Chapter one: Introduction and literature review……………………………………………8 Chapter two: From injudicious prescribing to the script doctor: transgressive addiction treatment in the interwar years…………………………………………………………….48 Chapter three: The Chelsea network and white drug use in the 1930s…………………….84 Chapter four: Heroin and the West End life, c.1935 to c.1938…………………………..116 Chapter five: The regulation of opiates under the classic British System, circa 1920 to circa 1945……………………………………………………………………………………….143 Chapter six: The Royal College of Physicians Committee on Drug Addiction, circa 1938 to circa 1947………………………………………………………………………………….176 Chapter seven: Morphine and Morale: The British System and the Second World War…………………………………………………………………………………………207 Chapter eight: Postwar Britain: Subcultural transitions and transmissions…………….....236 Chapter nine: Conclusions…………………………………………………………………270 Bibliography:……………………………………………………………………………….279 7 Chapter One: Introduction and Literature Review Introduction to the research For much of the twentieth century, a kind of dance was played out between the forces that sought to regulate what were then known as 'dangerous drugs', restricting their use to 'medical and scientific' purposes, and those who wished to consume them for pleasure and entertainment. This thesis maps out the movements of this dance during the half-century of the classic 'British System', a period that has hitherto been explored by historians only at its extremities, its beginning and end. The thesis takes two interwoven analytical targets – the opiate subculture and the web of regulation that was brought to bear upon it. Most histories of drugs have concentrated either on the regulation of drugs or on transgressive populations and subcultures; a key argument here is that the two are mutually constitutive and best explored together. The research examines the emergence, development and operation of the opiate subculture in Britain. It contends that current views situating the advent of the subculture in the 1950s and 60s are based on a number of erroneous assumptions and readings. It argues that an opiate- using subculture emerged during the interwar period. The 1930s, in particular, saw this subculture crystallising out of upper class bohemia and from the nightclub world of London's West End. The role played by the prescribing doctors of the 'British System' was a key component in this process. What became known and mythologised as 'the British System' was designed to regulate what were then termed 'dangerous drugs'. This thesis understands the latter term as referring not so much to a pharmacological and pharmaceutical object as a cultural one – a symbolic object that was, and still is, deployed as an indicator of the health or pathology of individuals and societies. At least as much as they are chemicals, drugs are objects of social and cultural 8 war.1 The UK's system of dealing with addiction to these substances, which involved the medical supply of doses to addicts, came to be known as the 'British System', particularly in the United States, which, in its domestic setting, developed a more restrictive set of arrangements centred on the prohibition of heroin. The Rolleston Committee and the British System The 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act was established in order to satisfy the obligations to which Britain had signed up when it ratified the International Opium Convention.2 While minimal regulations had previously applied to drugs such as opium, cocaine and morphine, these substances could now only be produced, exchanged and consumed by those authorised by the Act, or by individuals possessing a valid prescription from a medical practitioner.3 The objective was to confine such 'dangerous drugs' to 'medical and legitimate purposes', an imperative deriving from the International Opium Convention of 1912.4 However, though robust policing did succeed in limiting drug use and largely suppressing the street drug trade in London's West End, the problem of the doctor as gatekeeper to drugs, and of the forging of prescriptions, continued to grow. For the Home Office, which was the government department responsible for regulating dangerous drugs, the core problem was the prescription of drugs to addicts by doctors, which it sought to curtail – particularly in cases of long term or indefinite supply, which it regarded as merely pandering to the drug habit rather than constituting a bona fide medical treatment. 1J. Derrida (1989) ‘The Rhetoric of Drugs’ in Alexander, A. & Roberts, M. S. (eds.) High Culture: reflections on addiction and modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989) pp.19-42. 2 P. Bean, The Social Control of Drugs (London: Martin Robertson, 1974) p.23. See also W. B. McAllister, Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: An international history (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) pp.9-39. 3 Prior to this, the Defence of the Realm Act regulation

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