1. The main sources of information about the availability of drugs and the number of drug users in treatment were those compiled by the Home Office. Drug availability was gauged through the number of seizures of drugs both at borders and within England by enforcement agencies. As a measure of drugs available in England this was far from accurate. Shortcomings of the data and caveats for interpretation have been described elsewhere — for example, Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence, Drug Misuse in Britain 1996 (London: ISDD, 1997). However, as an indicator of relative increases, it has proved valuable.
2. Between 1968 and 1997 it was a statutory requirement for doctors treating patients dependent on opiates or cocaine to notify the Home Office’s Addicts Index. Although methods of data collection changed over this period and may not have been comprehensive or entirely accurate (for reasons such as the use of false names by drug users or doctors’ failure to notify the Index), this was considered the best source for comparisons over more than a decade and gave an indication of the vast increase in the number of addicted patients (see J. Mott, ‘Notification and the Home Office’, in J. Strang and M. Gossop (eds.), Heroin Addiction and Drug Policy: The British System (Oxford, New York, Tokyo: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 270–291).
3. V. Berridge, AIDS in the UK. The Making of Policy, 1981–1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 91.
4. H. Hudebine, ‘Applying cognitive policy analysis to the drug issue: harm reduction and the reversal of the deviantization of drug users in Britain 1985–2000’, Addiction Research and Theory, 13 (2005), 231–243.
5. H. B. Spear (and ed. J. Mott), Heroin Addiction Care and Control: The ‘British System’ 1916–1984 (London: Drugscope, 2002).