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The summer of love - when drugs were not a problem
The Scotsman Thursday 01 Jan 1998 DURING the summer of love in 1967, the newspapers were reporting shocking stories that children were taking LSD and other hard drugs, writes Jenny Booth. Faced with this threat to the health of the nation's youth, education ministers hastily ordered a survey of hard drug use among children to be conducted by medical officers of health (MOHs). Scotland's MOHs were the first to report back, according to government documents published today, and the news they brought was reassuring. "In Dundee there is no evidence of a problem and seems to be no need for any action to be taken," a Scottish Office memo of October 1967 states. "In Edinburgh no instances of drug taking among school children appear to have been drawn to the authority's notice. In Glasgow there is virtually no problem as regards hard drugs and LSD so far as school-children and college students are concerned, but quite a number of older school pupils and college students resort to 'pep pills' at times of stress." Thirty years on, 53 per cent of Scottish 16-year-olds in the summer of 1997 had tried illegal drugs before they left school, according to the anti-drugs campaign Scotland Against Drugs. It is difficult to compare this statistic with the 1967 survey, because trying drugs is not the same as having a problem with hard drugs. Most experimentation by teenagers today is with the soft drug cannabis, which would probably have fallen outside the remit of the MOHs' inquiries. Comparisons between 1967 and 1997 cannot be exact as attitudes to drugs are much harsher today. For example, in 1967 Scottish doctors still routinely treated heroin addicts as if they were sick and prescribed them medical heroin, but, in the same year, the Dangerous Drugs Act came into force, criminalising heroin, so that heroin addicts were sent to prison instead. The scale of the problem has also changed. In 1967 there were 1,299 notified heroin addicts; in 1994 there were 22,000 notified heroin addicts and an estimated 180,000 further addicts not registered with the health authorities. In 1967, it was a school medical officer who discovered that youngsters took pep pills when he "did a spot-check on a dozen young people being held in the remand centre and had nine positive responses, and this surprised him. The inspector of schools for the Glasgow area considers that the situation there does not appear to be a cause for undue concern and suggests that it would be best to leave it alone at this juncture." It is hard to imagine a response as mild as "surprise" if nine out 12 young people were found to be taking drugs today. "A considerable number of MOHs in the areas where there appears to be no problem doubted the wisdom of an active health education campaign lest it should encourage adolescents to experiment with drugs," the memo notes, preceding this year's findings of Edinburgh University's drugs expert Prof Martin Plant by three decades. "Quite a number of them, however, were providing health education on this subject in their areas." The idea of a national campaign of the type waged today by Scotland Against Drugs was seen as a waste of time in 1967. "As regards the future, most felt that a publicity campaign was neither necessary nor desirable," the Scottish home and health department note says.
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