JS Rafaeli (Author)
JS Rafaeli is a writer and musician based in London. He is the author of ‘Live at the Brixton Academy’, and a frequent contributor to Vice
Neil Woods
Neil Woods spent fourteen years (1993-2007) infiltrating drug gangs as an undercover policeman – befriending and gaining the trust of some of the most violent, unpredictable criminals in Britain. With the insight that can only come from having fought on its front lines, Neil came to see the true futility of the War on Drugs – that it demonises those who need help, and only empowers the very worst elements in society. Neil is a board member of the international organisation Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP) in the USA, and Chair of the organisation in the U.K. Made up exclusively of law enforcement figures, LEAP campaigns for an end to the drug war, and for drug policy to be based on evidence. He’s a regular pundit on the subject of drugs and drug policy in the media, and starred in Channel 4 Drugs Live.
JS Rafaeli
JS Rafaeli is a writer and musician based in London. He is the author of ‘Live at the Brixton Academy’, and a frequent contributor to Vice
Dedicated to all those around the world who fight against unjust laws.
The observation van is parked on a rough, dead-end street in Leeds, running surveillance on a high-level Bradford drug dealer. Suddenly, the van is surrounded by men in balaclavas. It is tied shut, doused in petrol and set on fire. The two cops inside barely get out alive.
It was no accident that the gangsters knew there was an obs van outside their safe house that night. They had moles inside the police feeding them information.
That incident was never reported in the press, but I remember the operation well. The thought of those two officers trapped inside the burning vehicle stuck with me – it forced me to once again ask myself a gnawing question. How has it come to this? How has it got to the point where the police come under attack because their own systems have been corrupted?
This wasn’t the first time on the force I’d experienced high-level corruption. When I was working under cover in Nottingham, my own unit had been infiltrated by the sociopathic drugs kingpin, Colin Gunn.
Gunn had hired a 19-year-old kid named Charles Fletcher to join the police – with specific instructions to get into CID. For years, Gunn paid Fletcher £2,000 a month on top of his police salary to pass on intelligence about ongoing investigations.
When I confronted my superiors about this I was met with a shrug. ‘With so much money in the drugs game, how can corruption not happen?’ It had got to the point that with drug investigations, police corruption had just become an accepted part of the game. How has it come to this?
On another major operation, the first lawful order we received was that under no circumstances were we to speak to anyone from Greater Manchester Police – and that if anyone from GMP approached us, we were to immediately report it. We were forced to work under the assumption that a major British police force was so riddled with moles and informants that any contact with them whatsoever was suspect. How has it come to this?
That question stuck with me throughout my final years on the force. It continued to trouble me even after I had left the police and tried to dedicate my life to undoing some of the harm that I had caused. Then we published the book Good Cop, Bad War.
The response to Good Cop hit me for six. We started receiving letters and emails from all over the country – and from around the world. There were messages from cops and ex-cops; addicts and family members of addicts; drug dealers and serving prisoners who had read the book in the prison library. These were all people who had experienced the War on Drugs at first hand – from both sides of the battle line.
Somehow, what we had written in Good Cop resonated with their experience. This outpouring of support and encouragement was both humbling and profoundly inspiring. Then, one letter came through that stopped me in my tracks.
It was from a young man named Adam, whose parents had both been intravenous heroin users. Adam spent his childhood caught in the chaotic mess of overdoses and arrests that often define the life of drug users under a system of prohibition. He spoke of witnessing the beatings his parents received at the hands of ruthless gangsters. He remembered seeing the desperation and shame in their eyes, and of knowing, even as a child, that what they needed was ‘help, support, and understanding, not prison and judgement’.
Adam wrote of how he watched the arms race of the War on Drugs unfold – how it got ‘more and more violent, more and more difficult’. He wrote of how ‘this war wasn’t going to be won with force, arrests, prison and isolation’.
He wrote of having to watch his own mother being forced to drink petrol over a £20 drug debt.
Once again, that question – how has it come to this?
In the face of Adam’s letter, and hundreds more like it, I decided I would finally try to answer that question.
We didn’t get here by accident. The situation Adam, myself and thousands of others caught up in the War on Drugs have found ourselves in, is the result of very specific decisions, taken over decades. These decisions need to be looked at.
The British War on Drugs is almost 60 years old. To explain how it functions, you need to look back into its roots. This is a story that has never been told – until now.
On Good Cop, Bad War, I worked closely with the writer JS Rafaeli. Throughout that process, we had begun to ask questions about the wider meaning of the personal story we were telling. How did the War on Drugs develop? What impact has it had on British policing and law enforcement? What can this tell us about the relationship between the individual and the state? On a personal level, considering these questions turned out to be invaluable in helping me begin to understand and process the PTSD from which I had suffered since leaving the police.
So, we decided to take on this new project together. By combining my inside perspective of the police with JS’s skills as a historian and journalist, we could confidently approach this hugely complex story. This book is a completely equal, joint effort between us – and has been an incredibly challenging, but rewarding, process for us both.
The first thing we decided was that we needed to talk about people. All too often when discussing drug policy, the conversation gets caught up in statistics and vague political ideas. It’s academics arguing with politicians arguing with cops – and everyone loses sight of the fact that behind the numbers lie real people, with real stories.
We wanted these voices to be heard. We wanted them brought back into the conversation. So, we spent months going up and down the country interviewing drug dealers, cops, addicts, health workers, activists and politicians – getting to the truth of what the British War on Drugs has meant to the people who actually fought it.
We met some extraordinary people. We cannot thank each and every one of them enough for their courage and generosity in sharing their experiences with us. By necessity, we have had to edit these interviews for flow and brevity, but this is absolutely their story.
Each chapter of this book, from the 1960s to the present day, covers themes that have been written about in depth by specialists and academics. We are building on their efforts, and could not have begun to put this story together without the work they have done.
However, this discussion too often happens only in academic circles. This book is meant for everyone – because this is a history that everyone should know. The War on Drugs happens on the street. It’s time to take its story out there too.
The most successful drug cartel in history was not run by a Colombian cocaine baron, a Mexican trafficking gang or an Afghan warlord. It was run by the British state.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the East India Company – backed by British military power – ran simultaneous monopolies on opium in China and hashish in India. In his wildest dreams, Pablo Escobar never got anywhere close. In 1997, when Tony Blair handed Hong Kong back to China, she was handing back the spoils of a nineteenth-century drug war.
At home it was a different story. The original substance-based moral panics in Britain were probably the Gin Crazes that intermittently rocked the country throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each of these crises produced a tabloid outcry, and calls for gin to be banned outright.
Each time, however, those calls were resisted. That was not the British way. Successive governments – including those led by conservative icons like the Duke of Wellington – chose to deal with the gin problem through regulation and licensing, not through law enforcement. This fitted within a deep-rooted British tradition of liberal pragmatism – and, by and large, it worked.
In terms of the modern War on Drugs, Britain has never matched the violence of the United States or Latin America. Yet, the UK occupies a unique and crucial place in the history of this global conflict. Britain is historically the country that has offered the most consistent and coherent alternative to the American-led War on Drugs. If there’s one essential discovery we made in trying to answer the question ‘How has it come to this?’, it’s that the drug war is a fundamentally un-British idea.
This is very much a lost history. Most people in Britain aren’t even aware of it. They should be. This book is an attempt to reclaim this vital thread in our national story.
The War on Drugs has caused chaos and suffering across the globe. This is the story of its British front – how, from tiny beginnings, it has grown and metastasised into a terrifying force that corrupts the very heart of criminal justice.
We believe this is a story that every British person should know. It speaks to many aspects of who we are as a country. But beyond that, our hope and belief in writing this book is that the story of the British experience of the War on Drugs can offer insight to all those who have been affected by it, throughout the world.
Neil Woods, 2018
Lee Harris never meant to start the British War on Drugs.
Sitting across from us today, Lee comes off as the archetypal sweet old hippy. He’s 81 years old, with three grandchildren, and talks nostalgically about the past with Buddhist beads around his neck and a mischievous twinkle in his eye. All in all, he seems a very unlikely starting point for a set of policies that has transformed the entire structure of the criminality, policing and culture of this country. But, as that generation never tires of reminding us, things were different back in the sixties.
‘I first came to Britain in 1956, at 19 years old,’ Lee begins. ‘I had to escape South Africa – on the run from the apartheid police. I had joined the Congress Movement as a white teenager, which was very rare back then – but I was a young socialist and truly believed in the cause.
‘I took part in a few underground actions, which got a lot of attention and the police came after us hard – so I had to leave the country. But I hated it anyway. I utterly despised apartheid – I couldn’t stand books being banned and having to hide what I was reading. It’s funny really – when I came to Britain I had never even drunk alcohol before, let alone smoked grass or anything. I was a socialist, a moral puritan. I thought drinking and partying was decadent and bourgeois.’
As a young immigrant, Lee supported himself by washing dishes in a run-down restaurant in Baker Street, before enrolling at drama school. It was here that he met a more bohemian crowd who introduced him to a new world – the world of Soho.
‘The first time I went to Wardour Street I was taken to some dive bar, and suddenly there was a knife fight between these butch lesbians and a local pimp. I fell in love with it all right there,’ Lee recalls with a wide grin. ‘I had read all the books from America by William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and I was attracted to the low life. I was young and curious, and this was dangerous and fun. There were all the musicians, actors, artists and clubs – but there were also a thousand prostitutes between Park Lane and Shepherd Market. I’d never seen anything like this – the pimps and the gangsters, and the male prostitute dilly boys hanging around Piccadilly Circus. I was fascinated by that whole world, and became a sort of journalist and explorer, trying to document it.’
Britain in this era was only just emerging from the drab, grey monotony of the post-war years. Rationing had only ended in 1954. The 1956 Suez Crisis exposed a country that ‘had lost an empire and had yet to find a role’. For all that people may now romanticise the Teddy Boys, the years between the euphoria of VE Day and the free love explosion of the later 1960s were culturally sullen, parochial and inward-looking.
The exception was Soho. This was the era of the Colony Room on Dean Street, where artists, actors and writers like Lucian Freud, Peter O’Toole, Francis Bacon and Dylan Thomas would drink, flirt and argue. Racially mixed jazz bands played swing in basement clubs, and homosexuals could live relatively openly. Soho was a sliver of Technicolor in a country still living in black and white. It also set the scene for the first convulsion of what would come to be known as ‘youth culture’.
The Mods were the first great cultural expression of the baby boom generation. Born just after the war, by the early 1960s they were just hitting their late teens – and they wanted to dance. Mods wore sharp suits, fought pitched battles with their rival tribe, the Rockers, and held all-night soul music parties in legendary Soho dives like the Scene, the Flamingo and the Marquee. It was into this netherworld that Lee Harris was drawn.
‘I became very close friends with Lionel Blake, who managed the Scene Club. The parties there were incredible. The young Mods were amazing dancers, the girls all had their hair cut short and everyone looked very slick. I saw Chuck Berry and early line-ups of the Who playing, and would hang out with Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones.
‘The kids would go dancing all night – then, at 5am everyone would spill out onto the street. You would walk down Wardour Street and there would be hundreds of these teenagers – 15-16-17-year-olds, all staggering around in the morning light.’
But, nobody dances all night without some extra fuel. And the fuel these kids ran on was French Blues, Black Bombers and Purple Hearts.
Amphetamines were first developed in the 1880s. They had been given to soldiers by both sides as performance enhancers during the Second World War, and throughout the 1950s were widely prescribed as diet pills and as a pick-me-up for tired housewives. Anthony Eden himself was prescribed Purple Hearts throughout the Suez Crisis.1
They were also absolutely central to the Mod scene of the early 1960s. Soho was awash with pills. Teenagers would get tattoos reading ‘SK & F’, standing for Smith, Kline & French, the pharmaceutical company that manufactured Purple Hearts. The clubs rang with drug rhymes like ‘feeling down, try red and brown’ and ‘have no fears with green and clears’.2 Kids would forge prescriptions and rob pharmacies to keep the scene supplied. Lee Harris looked on at all this with growing unease.
‘There’s no better drug to keep you dancing all night than amphetamines,’ he explains, ‘but the reason for all those so-called riots in seaside towns that the papers wrote about was that the kids would come out of the clubs at 5am, but still be completely high on the pep pills. So, they’d all drive out to Margate or Clacton just to have something to do because they couldn’t sleep. And that’s when the violence would erupt. I was there in Brighton when they were smashing all the shop windows – like the famous scene in the film Quadrophenia. They were all blocked on pep pills – that’s the word they used for being high, “blocked”.’
The Mod ‘riots’ of the mid-1960s were heavily reported in the press. Articles were loaded with images of leather jackets and motorbikes, using the symbolism of American films to whip up the fears of an older generation. In reality, these ‘riots’ were extremely rare, with relatively few arrests. Headlines like DAY OF TERROR BY SCOOTER GROUPS, from the Daily Telegraph, and WILD ONES INVADE SEASIDE in the Daily Mirror, now seem fairly ridiculous.
In fact, it was exactly the reporting of these disturbances that led the criminologist Steve Cohen to coin the phrase ‘moral panic’. This is an essential term. It refers to when ‘a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media.’ The dynamic of cynically constructed, media-driven moral panics is one that recurs over and over throughout this story.
But, for Lee Harris, a far greater concern than media-hyped street brawls were the horrors.
‘Kids would take 80 or 90 of these pills over a weekend,’ he continues. ‘It was sixpence for a Purple Heart – they did far too many and would get amphetamine psychosis. They called it getting the horrors. I would find these kids shivering and jabbering, totally terrified. It could take days for them to come down, so I would try and take care of them.
‘My family had fled to South Africa as refugees from Lithuania, but my father died and I was brought up in a Jewish orphanage. I think because of that I couldn’t see young people in pain and not try and help. I became a sort of guardian figure for some of these kids. If I found someone in a bad way I would bring them back to my flat and make them a cup of tea. I had a typewriter and a tape recorder, and sometimes I would let them talk about what they were experiencing – it seemed to help. Later, I used some of those recordings to write my play Buzz Buzz, based around the pep pills scene.’
It was this role as a protector of young amphetamine users that was to change the course of Lee Harris’s life – and ultimately, the entire direction of UK drug policy.
‘Early in 1964, I was on my way home and I stumbled on this kid on Wardour Street, in a really bad condition. He’d taken maybe 90 Purple Hearts and was having terrible horrors. His heart was racing, he was seeing bugs climbing the walls. So, I helped get him back to his family’s flat in Maida Vale.
‘It turned out that this kid had a history with pills. His father knew nothing about drugs and was desperate – he didn’t know what to do. So he called his local MP, who came down to the house personally to see if he could help. That’s how I met Ben Parkin.’
Ben Parkin was the Labour MP for Paddington. He had recently made a name for himself by exposing the corrupt property baron Peter Rachman, and was now looking for a new socially progressive crusade to increase his profile. In Lee Harris, he saw an opportunity.
‘We got the kid to bed,’ Lee continues, ‘then Parkin took me aside. He said he was worried about these pep pills and wanted to raise questions in Parliament. Only, he didn’t really know anything about them – but I did, so he asked if he could give my phone number to a journalist he knew. I was worried about how the pills were affecting the kids as well. But I didn’t know quite what I was getting into.
‘I went home and got some sleep, but that very afternoon my phone rang. “Hello, it’s Anne Sharpley from the Evening Standard – Ben Parkin said I should get in touch.”’
Anne Sharpley is a minor legend of British journalism. A trailblazing woman in a chauvinist era, she had made her name by sailing on the Windrush as it carried the first West Indian immigrants to Britain in 1948. Later, when covering Winston Churchill’s state funeral, she filed her copy from the nearest phone box, then cut the telephone cord to make sure no rival reporters got the scoop. Sharpley had been Parkin’s go-to journalist during his Rachman campaign, and now she was looking for a pills story.
‘I took Anne on the most glorious tour of Soho,’ says Lee, beaming. ‘I showed her all the dives, took her to all-night dances at the Scene and showed her how the kids were using pills. We became very good friends and stayed in touch for years afterward. I helped her with lots of other stories.’
The result was the headline I SEE SOHO’S PEP PILL CRAZE splashed across the front cover of the Evening Standard on 3 February 1964, followed by THE NON-STOP WORLD OF PILLS PARADISE the next day.
The two stories are a fascinating mix of genuinely interesting observation and exactly the kind of lurid sensationalism that would set the template for so much drugs reporting for decades to come.
Sharpley acutely notes that:
[The teenagers] are looking for, and getting, stimulation not intoxication. They want greater awareness, not escape. And the confidence and articulacy that the drugs of the amphetamine group give them is quite different from the drunken rowdiness of previous generations on a night out.
But she also peppers her copy with references to ‘tireless, sleep-free talkative super-teenagers … drifting from club to café, moment to moment, day to day with a strange, sterile energy that their new craze gives them.’3 The piece ends with a call for legal controls on Purple Hearts, and notes that Ben Parkin MP will be raising the issue in Parliament.
Parkin did indeed speak in Parliament that very Monday. The points he raised were so similar to Sharpley’s articles as to make the collusion obvious.
This media play had its intended effect. On 7 February, the Home Affairs Committee authorised the preparation of a bill for the control of amphetamines. In fact, the original bill was supposed to include barbiturates – believed by the medical community to be far more dangerous. But the burst of publicity around pep pills led the committee to focus solely on speed.4
While the deliberations on the bill were taking place, the Evening Standard realised it had found a winning formula and launched a Purple Hearts crusade. That month saw headlines including: PURPLE MENACE; THE PURPLE HEART PLOT; COME ON, TEENAGERS, STAMP OUT THE PILL-PUSHERS; PURPLE HEARTS ACTION; PURPLE HEARTS IN WEST END; and NOW YARD CAN STEP-UP WAR ON PURPLE HEARTS. The tabloids were figuring out that drug scares sell papers.
In late March the Stimulant Drugs Bill weaved amphetamines into the Drugs (Prevention of Misuse) Act of 1964. The Times noted the rushed nature of the debate, calling the result ‘hastily constructed legislation’, while The Economist was blunter, labelling it ‘a singularly ill-conceived bill’.5
For Lee Harris, though, the outcome was very different. ‘After that first Anne Sharpley piece came out, my phone started ringing off the hook. I suddenly became the stringer for anyone wanting to film or write about the drug scene. I had everyone through, from the Sunday Times to Granada Television, week after week. They’d call up and say, “We need a room with junkies fixing, and they have to be willing to go on camera.” So I’d have to round up all these junkies, and keep them all night to be ready for filming in the morning. Keeping junkies in one place overnight is bloody hard work you know.
‘And it’s funny, when Ben Parkin did his speech in Parliament, he talked about how the Evening Standard had spent thousands of pounds on this intense investigation. Well, I certainly never got more than fifty quid.’
It’s impossible to set an exact start date for the British War on Drugs. The most obvious candidate would be the Misuse of Drugs Act of 1971. But the roots go deeper. And something in Lee Harris’s story – the triangulation between an ambitious MP, an ambitious journalist and a self-appointed moral crusader – seems to lay a template for everything that was to come after.
The first casualty of any war is the truth, and the War on Drugs is no exception. If you wish to understand the modern concept of ‘fake news’, you need only look at how drugs have been reported for at least the last 60 years. Drug reporting has consistently focused not on accurately reflecting events, but on how it makes the reader feel. Every war ever fought has had a propaganda front. The tabloid press have, more often than not, served as the propaganda arm of the War on Drugs.
There had been drug scares before – the furore surrounding the death of the actress Billie Carleton in 1918, or the racist demonisation of the Chinese opium seller Billy Chang in 1922, to take just two examples. But, the dynamic that developed in the 1960s represented something new. The War on Drugs developed as an explicitly generational conflict. Across the UK, mothers and fathers who had lived through the Depression and the war watched their children pursuing trends they didn’t understand, and thus feared. They clamped down to maintain control.
Unfortunately, their efforts often ended up actually putting their children at greater risk. There was another dynamic set in motion in 1964 that was to repeat itself again and again as the War on Drugs developed – the law of unintended consequences.
The Stimulant Drugs Bill utterly failed to stop kids taking amphetamines. The Pharmaceutical Journal reported in 1965 that:
Even the severe penalties imposed by the Drugs (Prevention of Misuse) Act seem not to have deterred to any obvious extent those who misappropriate and misuse drugs – notoriously those of the amphetamine mixture type.
Even as the Mod culture of London gave way to hippy flower power over the coming years, amphetamine use exploded across the country as the Northern Soul movement took over with all-night parties at clubs like Wigan Casino and Manchester’s Twisted Wheel.
But, while the architects of the 1964 Act didn’t manage to stop kids taking speed, what they did manage to do was get them into heroin.
In the early 1960s, the tiny drug subcultures that existed in Britain stayed strictly separate – the Mods didn’t hang around with cannabis-smoking jazz fans, who wouldn’t be seen dead with the heroin users and junkies.6 In the wake of the 1964 Act, these divisions began to break down. It began with the pharmacy robberies.
One of the main supply routes for pep pills had been employee theft – people working for pharmacies would simply walk out with a box of pills and sell them on. Now that possession of Purple Hearts had been criminalised, employees became less willing to take the risk. The gap was quickly filled by robberies and hijackings.
In 1966, 16 of Salford’s 47 pharmacies were broken into. At a single pharmacy burglary in Kings Norton, 50,000 tablets were stolen. The rash of pharmacy robberies spread right across the country. What is crucial about these burglaries is that it was only the amphetamines that were stolen. They didn’t break in, sweep everything they could into a sack and sort it out later – they knew exactly what they were looking for, and took only the speed. The Pharmaceutical Journal noted:
The offences carry identical characteristics. No excessive damage is caused and the stock remains intact except a small range of specified drugs. The offender can recognise these tablets and capsules at sight.
To combat this explosion of ‘drugstore cowboy’ robberies, the Home Office brought in new rules dictating that all pharmacies must keep all controlled drugs in a secure, locked cabinet. This meant pharmacy burglars just had to work a bit harder and move a bit faster. One burglar interviewed by the sociologist Andrew Wilson recalled:
The first time we came across the new DDAs gerrin’ it open were a right job … we didn’t have two screwdrivers, you needed two good screwdrivers … but it was often noisy so you had to sweep everything into a bag and get out as quick as you could.
The burglars now didn’t have time to hand-pick the amphetamines – they just swept everything into their sacks. But the Purple Hearts were now being stored along with heroin, barbiturates and other drugs and the burglars were accidentally ending up with swag bags full of opiates they didn’t know what to do with. So, they did what any entrepreneurial villain would do – they found people to sell them to. Suddenly, amphetamine users and heroin users began mixing in a way they never had before. For the first time speed users were introduced to the use of needles.
Traditionally, Mods were ‘pill-heads’ – it was central to their sharp, cool self-image. Now, mixing with heroin users, the taboo around needles broke down. Once people had learned to inject speed, it was a much easier step to injecting heroin – shooting one drug was much like shooting another. Another of Wilson’s interviewees recalls that this is:
what led to cranking and consequently to junk … a lot of people on t’nighters turning to junkies … They cranked the speed. People who cranked speed tended to keep the company of others, they were a clique inside a clique.
Heroin use rocketed among the Mod community. The legal attempts to control Purple Hearts had inadvertently broken down the distinct drug culture that Anne Sharpley had originally described, creating Britain’s first significant population of poly-drug users.
The story of the War on Drugs is a story of the law of unintended consequences. At their height, the Soho Mods of the early 1960s were maybe a few thousand people. But, in the story of how the government tried to control Purple Hearts, one can see, in its tiniest, most embryonic form, exactly the dynamic that would be replayed over and over, with ever-increasing ramifications, for the next six decades. And it all started with a conversation between Lee Harris and Ben Parkin in a Maida Vale flat in 1964.
For Lee himself, though, there were intensely conflicted feelings around the part that he played.
‘First off, the clubs were all raided,’ he explains. ‘I was there – I watched the police storm in and all the Mods just throw their pills on the floor. My great friend Lionel Blake got busted and got 15 months for running a “disorderly house”. I put together an affidavit that he was a good person, and went to visit him in prison.
‘I definitely had a moral conflict. I never wanted to destroy the scene. But I couldn’t see kids that young in trouble with pills like that. I tried those amphetamines and couldn’t stand them. But, I always felt ashamed of my role in prohibition. I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to make up for that mistake.’
When everything really changed for Lee, though, was when he tried another controversial drug just gaining popularity in the mid-1960s – cannabis.
‘We’d heard rumours and stories of this strange stuff called marijuana or Indian hemp – mainly in the West Indian community. Then one night, I was walking down Oxford Street with this Irish guy, and he said, “Here, try a bit of this.” Well, my conversion came right there!
‘I think I saw how so many people were being treated, and I realised, “Oh hell! I’ve come all the way from South Africa because I hated the state banning everything – and yet here I am, being instrumentalised in another system like that.” That’s what drove all my future activist work.’
Lee reorientated his entire outlook and became a lifelong activist in favour of legalising cannabis. He mixed with the musicians, artists and psychedelic explorers of the hippy era, becoming a central figure in the legalisation movement. In the 1970s, Lee opened Britain’s longest-running head shop, Alchemy, on London’s Portobello Road, and published Homegrown, the country’s first ‘weed magazine’.
Over time Lee Harris has become a minor cult legend of the British bohemian scene. In 2016, at 79 years old, he stood in the election for Mayor of London, representing the Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol party – and picked up over 20,000 votes. But, the dynamic he unwittingly helped establish back in 1964, tying together the tabloid press and grandstanding politicians, represented the beginnings of a process that was about to reshape fundamental aspects of British life and culture.
We live in a drug-saturated culture. Anyone reading this has experienced a world of rave music, Trainspotting, Bob Marley, American presidents who claim they didn’t inhale – and British prime ministers who admit that they did.
It is almost impossible for us to reimagine ourselves back to a Britain in which drugs were virtually unknown. But by far the most striking feature of the drugs scene of the mid-1960s is just how tiny it was. In 1945 there had been four convictions for cannabis in the whole of the UK. In 1964 there were 342 registered British heroin addicts. Drugs were something the vast majority of people simply didn’t know about.
With a few exceptions of some, largely West Indian, cannabis use in Notting Hill and a few port cities like Liverpool and Cardiff, the entire mid-1960s British drugs scene was pretty much contained in the web of Soho streets between Charing Cross Road and Green Park. This book is about how certain decisions were taken that transformed this tiny, insular community into the millions of users that we see today.
Prior to the nineteenth century, drugs now illegal were widely used across Britain. In a country without universal healthcare, ‘poppyhead tea’ was commonly brewed as a painkiller and folk remedy. Later, opium was imported and sold everywhere from high-street pharmacies to rural grocery stores.
This was all completely legal. Most people used opium or laudanum (a tincture of morphine and codeine) purely as a medicine. A few, such as the writers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey, took opiates seeking pleasure and mind expansion. Queen Victoria herself was fond of both opium and cannabis, before being introduced to cocaine later in life.
As technology and trade progressed over the nineteenth century, new professions emerged. Old-fashioned folk healers and apothecaries gave way to a new class of professional pharmacists, who gradually took control of drug supply. In 1868, the Pharmacy Act placed opium under pharmaceutical control with minimal regulation.
This was the birth of what came to be known as ‘the British System’.
Within the tiny group of academics who study drug policy, the British System of treating heroin addiction is widely and fiercely debated. Outside this narrow clique, it is virtually unknown – an idea lost to history.
The story of the British System – of what happened to it and what it tells us about Britain as a country – is crucial. This is not only a story that every British person should know, but one from which people around the world can learn profound lessons as well.
The British System is a slippery concept. Some experts argue it isn’t a system at all, but an overlapping ‘system of systems’, or a ‘system of not having a system’. But all these interpretations boil down to one essential idea – that drug addiction is not a moral category, but a medical issue that should be treated by doctors, not law enforcement. This springs from age-old liberal traditions in British political life – traditions that favour custom over writ, personal liberty over state power and pragmatism over blind obedience to rules.
Crucially, the British System stands in absolute opposition to the American model, in which illegal drugs are seen as a moral evil in themselves, and prohibition by law enforcement the only approach to deal with them.
Throughout the First World War, cocaine was widely used as a dental anaesthetic and medicinal pick-me-up. Harrods offered small packages of cocaine and morphine as ‘A Useful Present for Friends at the Front’, which became a common train-station gift for girls to give their boyfriends as they left for the trenches.
Then came the foreign troops. By 1915, a quarter of a million Canadian troops were stationed in Britain. Rumours began to spread that these Canadians were using cocaine for pleasure, rather than root canal surgery. Soon The Times was thundering that cocaine was ‘more deadly than bullets’, and in July 1916, cocaine, morphine and several other drugs were brought under the Defence of the Realm Act – the same Act that had first introduced pub-licensing hours in 1914.
In fact, the rumours of rampant cocaine use had been absurdly exaggerated, if not completely invented. The entire furore turned out to be based on a single Canadian major stationed in Folkestone, who had arranged one sting operation to buy a packet of black-market cocaine from a West End prostitute. The select committee appointed to examine the problem reported back that ‘there is no evidence of any kind to show that there is any serious, or, perhaps, even noticeable prevalence of the cocaine habit amongst the civilian or military population of Great Britain.’ But of course, by then newspapers had been sold, laws passed and, in the midst of the Great War, the country had other pressing concerns.
Britain emerged from the war a nation transformed. The relationship between the individual and the state was being fundamentally renegotiated. Women got the vote, and the first governmental Ministry of Health was founded in 1919. Debate immediately began on whether the medical profession or the Home Office should take the lead in the regulation of drug use.
The United States, the rising power on the world stage, had banned all drugs with the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, and was strongly pushing their moralising, prohibitionist approach across the world. Sir Malcolm Delevingne, the relevant official at the Home Office, had some sympathy with the American outlook. He received furious opposition from the medical community. W.E. Dixon, reader in pharmacology at Cambridge, wrote to The Times in 1923:
We do not seem to have learnt anything from the experience of our American brethren … cannot our legislators understand that our only hope of stamping out the drug addict is through the doctors, that legislation above the doctors’ heads is likely to prove our undoing and that we can no more stamp out addiction by prohibition than we can stamp out insanity?7
Looking at the numbers, he had a point. In this era the heroin addict population of the US numbered in the hundreds of thousands, Britain’s in the hundreds. Eventually a committee was formed to consider these questions, under the leadership of Sir Humphry Rolleston, President of the Royal College of Physicians.
The Rolleston Committee, formed in 1924, deliberated over a series of 23 meetings and called over 30 expert witnesses. The result was the British System as it came to be known among international policymakers. Doctors could use their own discretion in prescribing heroin to treat addiction, with loose overall control remaining with the Home Office. For the next four decades, this pragmatic system was to save Britain from developing any hint of a US-style heroin black market run by gangsters.
It’s important to note that none of these decisions were taken out of some altruistic concern for drug addicts. This was about protecting the right of doctors not to have the Home Office telling them what to do. With only a few hundred drug addicts in Britain at the time, this was considered a very minor issue, essentially boiling down to a turf war between two newly modernising professional classes – the medical community and the Home Office bureaucracy.
What is striking about the discussions and reports of the Rolleston Committee, though, is their consistent sobriety. There is not a hint of the moralising hysteria that characterised similar discussions in America. Drug addiction is always spoken about as an ‘unfortunate condition’ – but never as ‘evil’, never as a moral failure.
And, for roughly four decades, the Rolleston System more or less seemed to work. Between 1936 and 1953 the number of known drug addicts in Britain fell from 616 to 290, before rising again to 454 by 1960.
Compare this to countries that adopted a prohibition model – Canada had roughly 150,000 addicts and the US 350,000. It is no wonder that the British fought tooth and nail to preserve their system against the encroachment of the American model, which was being aggressively pushed on them.
The American approach to drug policy has been defined by two key historical features – moralising fervour and racial prejudice. It began on the railroads.
Thousands of Chinese workers came to America during the mid-1800s to build the Central Pacific Railroad. Once the railroad was complete, however, they were immediately regarded as a threat to white workers. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the only US law to ever ban immigration solely on the basis of race.
One method of stirring up anti-Chinese hatred was to attack the practice of opium smoking. No matter that morphine and laudanum were popular medicines throughout the US; Chinese opium was seen as a threat to American Christian morality, and particularly to American Christian women.
By 1881, as the Exclusion Act was being debated in Congress, reports began flooding out of San Francisco of opium dens where ‘white women and Chinamen sit side by side under the effects of this drug – a humiliating sight to anyone with anything left of manhood’. Newspaper editorials thundered that the Chinese opium menace must by wiped out lest it ‘decimate our youth, emasculate the coming generation, if not completely destroy the population of our coast,’ and that for white Americans, smoking opium was ‘not at all consistent with their duties as Capitalists or Christians.’8
Then, in 1898, America became an imperial power, conquering the Philippines in the Spanish–American War. Charles H. Brent, the openly racist Episcopal bishop of the Philippines, despised opium users, and appealed to President Roosevelt to ban this ‘evil and immoral’ habit. By 1905 Brent had succeeded in installing the first American prohibition regime – not in the US itself, but in its new Pacific colony.9
Unfortunately, the ban completely failed to actually curb opium use in the Philippines. Bishop Brent decided this must be the fault of the booming trade in China, and wrote again to President Roosevelt, urging that the United States had a duty to ‘promote some movement that would gather in its embrace representatives from all countries where the traffic and use of opium is a matter of moment.’10
In the American debate, drug addiction had long been framed as an infection or contamination of white America by foreign influences. Now that vision was internationalised. To protect white American moral purity, the supply of drugs from overseas had to be curtailed at their source. As the campaigner Richard P. Hobson had it, ‘like the invasions and plagues of history, the scourge of narcotic drug addiction came out of Asia’.11 The idea of international control of the drug trade was born.
In 1909, America succeeded in convening the first International Commission on Opium in Shanghai. Representing the US were Bishop Brent and the doctor Hamilton Wright, who was to become a major force in the American prohibitionist movement. The Americans had originally wanted to convene a formal conference, rather than just a commission, but had been blocked by another international power – Great Britain.
After lengthy discussions, the commission adopted a number of non-binding resolutions, crucially the principle that ‘the use of opium for non-medical purposes is held by almost any participating country to be a matter for prohibition or for careful regulation.’12 Once again, the bloc that insisted on the inclusion of the word ‘almost’ was led by the British delegation. This was the beginning of a pattern repeated throughout the next 50 years. Great Britain consistently took a leading role in resisting the international prohibitionist approach aggressively pushed by the US.
This resistance was down to a number of factors. Britain still operated a monopoly on the opium trade and certainly wished to protect her business interests. In turn, the Americans thought that by opposing opium they could curry favour with Chinese authorities, to undermine Britain and advance their own commercial interests in the country.
But, alongside this, there was also simply a different view of what drug addiction meant.
The British resented America’s ‘overtones of high-mindedness and superior virtue’. These issues were a source of serious friction with the US. Occasionally it got personal. One frustrated Foreign Office official reported back that Hamilton Wright’s wife, Elizabeth, was ‘incompetent, prejudiced, ignorant, and so constituted temperamentally as to afford a ready means of mischief-making.’
But it was difficult for the US to push the prohibition of drugs on the rest of the world while not enforcing it itself. Wright began spearheading a fresh campaign for full drug prohibition within the US – once again built almost entirely on racial prejudice.
But this time, a new drug had emerged to capture America’s fevered imagination, with another racial minority to persecute. The drug was cocaine, and the minority, African-Americans. In 1910, Wright submitted a report to the Senate stating that ‘this new vice, the cocaine vice … has been a potent incentive in driving the humbler negroes all over the country to abnormal crimes.’13
There was an explosion of headlines linking black people to cocaine use and criminality. The New York Times ran a typical story under the headline NEGRO COCAINE FIENDS – NEW SOUTHERN MENACE. The story tells of ‘a hitherto inoffensive negro’, who had reportedly taken cocaine and been sent into a frenzy. The local police chief was forced to shoot him several times to bring him down. Cocaine, it was implied, was turning black men into superhuman brutes. As the medical officer quoted in the article bluntly put it, ‘the cocaine nigger sure is hard to kill’.14
This hysteria resulted in the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, instituting the prohibition of drugs across the United States. Over the next 50 years America would aggressively seek to internationalise this prohibition across the world.
In 1925, just as the Rolleston Committee was completing its work in London, a new international opium conference convened in Geneva. The British were central in spearheading opposition to the international controls demanded by the US, causing the American delegation to walk out of the conference. When the US urged the complete international prohibition of cannabis, all but three member states voted in favour – the rebels were Great Britain, the Netherlands and India.
Bishop Brent’s response to the setback in Geneva was that: ‘Christ and his religion are brought under reproach and open shame.’ The gulf between this religious condemnation and the sober, medical language of the Rolleston Committee could not be more striking. Time and time again, Great Britain was the country that stood opposed to this moralising American language – and was one of the last developed nations forced to adopt the American system.
Harry J. Anslinger was appointed head of the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930. Alcohol prohibition was about to be repealed, and this tiny department must have seemed like a dead-end posting. But Anslinger embarked on a campaign of political and media manipulation that was to build drug prohibition into a key plank of US domestic and foreign policy. He was to remain head of the FBN for 32 years, serving under five presidents and holding his office longer than any other senior civil servant save Herbert Hoover.
Anslinger was in many ways the architect of the modern War on Drugs – and the archetype of the moralising drug warrior. To him, drugs were a moral evil in themselves. Users were ‘criminals first, addicts afterwards’, and the only way to rid the world of this evil was a punitive, law enforcement approach. Anslinger was ruthless in his crusade, often stooping to methods that were unethical and, at times, actually illegal – particularly in the monitoring and persecution of artists, scientists and intellectuals he saw as a threat.15
He was also a race baiter. In order to whip up hysteria in the press, Anslinger incessantly played on racial fear and prejudice, linking cannabis to Hispanic people, cocaine to African-Americans and heroin to the Chinese.