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Heroin - The Treatment of Addiction in Twentieth-century Britain (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,677
Discovery Miles 16 770
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Heroin - The Treatment of Addiction in Twentieth-century Britain (Hardcover)
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Total price: R1,697
Discovery Miles: 16 970
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Heroin, often viewed as the "hardest drug," looms large in the
popular consciousness. Heroin addiction in Britain first began to
cause concern during the 1920s, yet while one group of doctors
regarded the addiction as a disease which required treatment, other
physicians viewed it as a vice which demanded strict control. The
medical community and the government have debated both the
definition of addiction-medical condition, moral failing or social
problem-and the method of dealing with addiction-medical treatment
vs. legal controls. In Heroin, Alex Mold examines the interaction
of the different approaches to heroin addiction and argues that the
treatment of the addiction as a disease and the control of heroin
as a social problem could, in practice, rarely be separated.
Treatment became a way of controlling the addiction and the addicts
themselves, but debates about the nature of addiction treatment and
the methods used resulted in politicisation of the topic. During
the late 1960s Drug Dependence Units (DDUs) were established as a
means to combine both medical treatment and social control. The
"British System" essentially treated addiction as a disease and
offered maintenance-the administering of heroin or an opioid
substitute on a long-term basis-as treatment. Maintenance proved to
be a source of tension between psychiatrists specialising in
addiction treatment and private and general practitioners who
operated outside the DDUs. This conflict manifested itself in
heated disputes on the pages of medical journals, in government
committees and in disciplinary hearings before the General Medical
Council. The same debates, conflicts and tensions which have beset
drug addiction treatment since the beginning of the twentieth
century persist today. Despite international laws and codes
concerning addiction and treatment, there is much that is peculiar
and significant about the British case. Drawing on government
papers, private archival collections, medical journals, oral
history sources and official reports, Mold presents the first
detailed historical analysis on the subject. Historians,
sociologists, addiction specialists and contemporary policy-makers
can look to this groundbreaking study to learn from the past and
shape the future response to heroin addiction.
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