- Matthew Limb
- London
- mattlimb.uk{at}gmail.com
In the early 1980s the UK felt the blast of a new wind blowing from the US, bringing with it calls for prohibition in response to president Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs.
Opposition was brewing among UK politicians and some doctors to the so-called “British system” of prescribing heroin to people who had become dependent on it, a model developed in the 1920s by Humphrey Rolleston.1
At the time Bert Brooker, a senior consultant psychiatrist at Halton Hospital in Cheshire, former Royal Air Force serviceman, and Antarctic adventurer, had been running a drug dependency clinic for several years. He was a strong advocate of the British system.
The theory behind doctors prescribing heroin to users was that it was a pragmatic approach and therefore better geared to reducing harms experienced by individuals and society.
Brooker appointed a young psychiatrist, John Marks, to examine the efficacy of a Rolleston-style drug dependency clinic in Widnes and Liverpool. When Marks joined Brooker in 1982 he doubted that the clinic would do much good and might even …
