Drug Crazy: How We Got Into this Mess and How We Can Get Out - Lessons from the Old Country - Page 156

Nonetheless, this sudden jump was alarming to the British and they were equally unnerved by the look of these new addicts. As the upheaval of the ‘60s washed over England, it brought with it a whole new category of drug user—long-haired rebels with “unsatisfactory work records” who got high for the hell of it. All of a sudden there was a drug subculture in London to rival Greenwich Village. Concentrated in Picadilly, the scene was so outrageous it became a tourist attraction and the Home Office decided something had to be done. Yet another panel of eminent medics, this time under the guidance of Lord Russell Brain, were commissioned to look into it.  They discovered that most of these new users were getting their stash from just six London doctors.  One apparently tireless physician wrote scrips for 600,000 tabs of heroin in a single year.^[7]  Clearly this was not sound medical practice.

When the Brain Committee reported back in the summer of 1965, they concluded that the business of maintaining addicts should be taken out of the hands of the general practitioner and turned over to specialists. For the first time in history, the unlimited power of the individual English physician to prescribe drugs was to be circumscribed—but only for addiction.  If an ordinary patient needed pain relief, his doctor could still prescribe anything in the book.  If, however, the patient was an addict, he would generally have to go to a treatment center and see a doctor who was specifically licensed to prescribe heroin and cocaine on a continuing basis.^[8]

Since there were so few addicts in England and so many in America, the people charged with setting up the new treatment centers naturally looked to the U.S. to see what the experts were doing. In the States, of course, the idea of heroin maintenance was considered the height of madness.  Detoxification was the objective.  The typical regimen in New York at that time was a decreasing dose of methadone designed to wean the addict off the drug as rapidly as possible. Methadone is a man-made replica of morphine that came out of World War II.  It was a synthetic painkiller developed by I.G. Farben when the