The legal use of what we now term illicit drugs was widespread in nineteenth-century Britain. Opiates in various forms were used by all levels of society, both for self-medication and for what we now call recreational use. The differentiation between medical and nonmedical usage was not clearly drawn then. Concepts such as addiction were not then widely accepted. The story of drug use in Britain since the late nineteenth century is the story of how and why drugs became defined as a social problem and which factors brought the establishment of certain forms of drug-control policy. These were, in fact, issues that often bore little relationship to the objective dangers of the drugs concerned.

In the early twentieth century, there was limited involvement either by doctors or by the state in the control of drug use and addiction. The supply of opiates...