Heroin Regulation in Britain and Social Control

Before heroin became a separate legal problem

In a society where opium was already present, heroin was introduced. In Victorian Britain, opium-based products were consumed as treatments for a whole range of common conditions. And these products were sold in commercial establishments. This is a far cry from the later paradigm of illicit substances, a discrete category of ‘bad stuff’. It is this earlier context that Seddon, using historical methods of exploring how commerce, medicine and domestic use intersect, explains (2007, p. 145).

The Pharmacy Act of 1868 provided for pharmacists to be the only ones dispensing opium covered by the legislation. The focus was on the place of sale, not a blanket ban on possession or use. Initially certain patent medications were not covered. The important point is that limiting who can dispense a particular substance is one thing. Banning the unauthorised use of it by people who use it is something else (Seddon, 2007, pp. 145-146).

Heroin (diamorphine) was first produced in 1874. It was first sold in 1898. In Britain initially it was part of the regulatory system for pharmacies and poisons. Some doctors then were aware of withdrawal issues. Others saw benefits in its use. So the shift in regulation cannot be explained simply as society suddenly becoming aware of a hidden threat that could only be addressed in one particular way (Seddon, 2007, p. 146).

It is perhaps easier to understand the shift in the object of regulation by looking at the chronology briefly. The shift was from regulation of sellers in a pharmaceutical market to having authorised uses and more direct intervention in regulating drug access.

International agreements and the 1920 turning point

There was a broader international context. There were international meetings starting from 1909 and the Hague Convention (1912), which shaped an international context and basis for cooperation. Seddon discusses the context of growing international trade and previous international regulation of pharmaceuticals that contributed to this context (2007:146-148).

The language of the treaty makes it clear that the notion of medical and authorised use was fundamental. For example, the 1912 International Opium Convention had Article 9, which meant that there should be controls on the use of morphine and cocaine, to be used only for medical and legitimate purposes. Article 14 added that specific controls on manufacturing, import, sale and export should also apply to heroin and certain preparations. So part of the developing international context was a distinction between legal pathways and other movements (International Opium Convention, 1912: Arts 9, 14).

World War I precipitated an acceleration of British intervention. As one of the details Seddon mentions, it was Regulation 40B in the war context (not concerning morphine or heroin), which was about cocaine and opium (Seddon, 2007:146-147). Afterwards, treaty obligations set the stage for the Dangerous Drugs Act 1920.

The original Act shows us the legal architecture. Section 7 permitted the making of regulations on manufacture, sale, possession, distribution and prescribing (including on medical prescriptions). Section 8 specifically added diamorphine, which was named as heroin. Section 13 made breaches of regulations and licence conditions offences. So the original Act and the legal architecture authorised by it set a legal framework that had legal, criminal consequences. But there were medical and pharmaceutical routes available (Dangerous Drugs Act 1920: ss. 7-8, 13).

This reconfiguration of authority was in part a sociological shift. It was now more about permission from these institutional sources of access. It was about who provided the substance and under what controls for what purpose that was regarded as valid, for the understanding of its status. It was no longer just a matter of the chemical substance.

What the Rolleston Report settled

When access to heroin was limited to legitimate medical use, a related question that remained open was whether prescribing for the treatment of dependence itself could be considered. This was the matter addressed by the Rolleston Committee established in 1924. The report from the committee came in 1926 and helped define the place of medicine in the new system of control that was taking shape (Seddon, 2007, p. 147).

As Seddon points out, the report accepted the use of prescribing to allow gradual withdrawal and, in certain circumstances where withdrawal was not possible, longer-term maintenance. These were constrained medical decisions in a constrained system. The outcome was a system that later came to be called the British System. It combined criminal controls with an established place for medical prescribing (2007, p. 147).

At the same time, evidence presented to the committee also points towards the reality that heroin addiction was extraordinarily uncommon at that point in time. This isn’t a statement about today’s accurate estimate of the population prevalence, but about the evidence seen by the committee. It adds force to Seddon’s questioning. A large change in regulation occurred in the absence of the mass heroin epidemic we would expect to find if we were simply assuming a crisis-response approach to this (2007, p. 147).

So here the report is an example of two things. Not only is it preserving room for treatment to take place, but it is also helping to shape the conditions for the professional circumstances for what could be considered legitimate access. The authority of medicine is part of how control is structured.

Why care and punishment could coexist

In order to explain this mix, Seddon invokes David Garland’s analysis of penal-welfarism – a term for the merging of penal agencies with welfare measures for reform, control and rehabilitation. Here, it is a tool for thinking about the possible co-evolution of help and constraint in the regulation of drugs in Britain (2007, pp. 148-149).

More generally, this is a departure from the Victorian notion of the minimal state to the more extensive intrusion into health and social realms. That does not mean that the state was not intervening in the nineteenth century. Rather, it is about the increasing acceptability of intervention and the growing belief that state agencies might make us better as individuals and as a society. The regulation of heroin is a part of this general movement in the domain of what the state may be expected to do (Seddon, 2007, pp. 148-150).

Against this backdrop, doctors and criminal authorities have roles that are complementary – medicine defines what needs treatment and sanctions a controlled channel for a controlled drug. And criminal law adds on extra constraints to this channel. Different professions may be at loggerheads but Seddon suggests that the eventual resolution of these conflicts reflects a general connection between welfare and punishment as well (2007, p. 149).

This view of things alters the logic for examining the growth of treatment. Presence of treatment does not automatically reveal anything about the person’s autonomy or about the conditions of access. An institution may be helpful but in addition to helping, it may also be sorting, tracking or guiding individuals. These questions have to be looked at and specific to each situation. It cannot be that everything means the same everywhere.

In terms of an assessment of a treatment policy, for instance, one might ask about the basis of the decision to admit someone to treatment. Is there a way to challenge these decisions? What happens if someone is unable to meet a particular condition? Such are analytical elaborations of Seddon’s claim. These are not outcomes in his study but elaborations on the analysis. They anchor the relation between care and power. Care as medical support is not all the same. Nor is the exercise of constraint in the form of criminal enforcement.

Addiction and the meaning of responsibility

Changes in the regulation were matched by changes in how habitual drug use was viewed. Seddon describes a shift from explai ning habitual drug use as the product of a bad habit to medical models of addiction. But while the historical disease model may have dispelled notions of will and character and responsibility, this does not mean that the latter were absent. They were still integral to debates over the regulation of the dependent (2007, pp. 150-151).

The challenge lay in balancing a situation where behaviour was determined by a condition that was not within the individual’s control with the justification for punishment. On the other hand, if behaviour was fully determined by free choice, it may raise questions of the justification for therapeutic intervention. In Garland’s discussion of penal policy the notion of a defective character allowed responsibility to be combined with a lack of control. In Seddon’s comparison with the field of addiction a reduced capacity for will was compatible with contrasting notions of sickness or choice. The similarities and mutual compromises in these cases Seddon links to the combination of medical and penal responses (2007, pp. 150-151).

It should be emphasized that these historical definitions are to be understood as the categories adopted by certain institutions and commentators. They are not the language adopted in this essay to describe those with dependence. They are of interest because classification is not only used to describe behaviour, but can also establish responsibilities. Identifying someone as ill may give the individual a right to assistance, but also make them subject to professional oversight.

Secondly, the historical perspective should be kept separate from the discussion of physical impact. The World Health Organization classifies heroin as an opioid and describes the potential for dependence, interference with breathing and the risk of fatal overdose that can occur as a result of opioids (World Health Organization, 2025). Our analysis of social classifications of dependence does not render these harms into something that does not exist. It is a question of how harm becomes translated into rules, which institutions are given authority and on which situations there is focus.

Race and the politics of national decline

Another point in Seddon’s work is his discussion of early British race politics and drug control. In popular presentations of Chinese opium dens, for example, in the area of Limehouse in London, a relationship was drawn between drug use and supposed dangers to white women and interracial intimacy. These are racial representations of populations and behaviours, not neutral representations to be uncritically repeated as fact in the history of drugs (2007, pp. 151-152).

But the power of these ideas is perhaps more evident if they are also understood in the context of fears of national decline and perceptions of the fitness of the population. Seddon relates these concerns to the influence of eugenics and broader work to classify and control the socially unfit. Drug control took on significance in these debates. It related to questions of national identity and the dangers supposedly posed to its future (2007, pp. 151-152).

In these aspects of Seddon’s argument we see a motivation for the need to be attentive to representations as well as laws in accounts of drug policy. Images of dangerous substances can become fused with images of a supposedly dangerous population. If such fusions are compelling then wider prejudices, far beyond the substance, may underpin the arguments for intervention.

While not suggesting racial anxiety as a full explanation for all measures, Seddon’s work sets this issue in the wider context of international trends, institutional interests, and the evolution of ideas about government. A detailed analysis of Seddon’s work thus avoids seeing a simple explanation for a complex transformation. Instead, it examines how a range of pressures led to certain sorts of intervention being perceived as legitimate by those with power.

A framework for reading drug policy

Another way of building on Seddon’s work is to outline three things that tend to get bundled together in simplistic public discussions of a single drug:

(1) The material effects of the drug – What are the harms and therapeutic potentials of the substance? In what circumstances? To answer that we need the right scientific evidence. We can’t just substitute a history of regulation. (2) Institutional factors – Who is permitted to produce or supply? Who gets to decide what use is legitimate? Under what conditions is access allowed? How do you contest decisions? The British history we’re looking at here offers an example of how these factors can lead to a mix of authorised medical access and criminal controls (Seddon 2007, 147-149).

(3) Social significance – How do you label people who use the substance? How does this affect their treatment? As Seddon has argued in sections on responsibility and racial politics, this is not a question we can simply read off of the pharmacology (2007, 150-152). There may be a host of judgements – about sickness, respectability, national identification, personal conduct – encoded in the same regime.

By separating these issues we can bring out some bad arguments. Just because there’s evidence that a substance is dangerous, it doesn’t follow that all potential criminal sanctions are effective/appropriate. Just because a law has historical roots in a bigoted political climate, it doesn’t follow that the best alternative is obvious. We have to have the right sort of evidence for the claim we’re making.

For example, consider the historical separation of medically authorised access to diamorphine and illegal circulation of heroin. We are drawing this separation out of the professional/legal institutional structure of the substance. This is not the same as saying that there is no difference in composition or dosage or circumstances of use between pharmaceutical and illicit forms. But it does mean that a serious analysis needs to focus on both material factors of consumption and institutional factors.

Likewise this approach lets us do interesting things with pharmaceutical regulatory comparison. For instance, Seddon is making the point that controls over illicit drugs were developed alongside general drug regulation. So we can add issues like production, prescribing, professional responsibility, access to the mix in a debate that otherwise seems to get stuck on the legal or illegal question (2007, 152-153).

The limits of the historical argument

The article by Seddon is a historical and theoretical reading of current literature; it is not a clinical trial, representative survey of drug users, or a statistical analysis of different policy outcomes. The main claim is that it provides an explanatory link between a change in institutional form and broader social forms (2007, pp. 144-145).

The explanatory orientation is of considerable value, but also has some limitations. For instance, it does not tell us about the experience of all individuals in the system, whether people in different categories had equal access to medical support or which specific intervention gave the best health outcomes. These would be further areas of research. These are not reasons to reject the main thrust of this article, but are the limits of what can be inferred from this article.

Similarly, the spatial and temporal scope is relevant. It is not necessarily the case that British history is automatically relevant to understanding the evolution of drug control in Pakistan or elsewhere. We should also be cautious of implicitly assuming that anything we read about current policy (in an article published in 2007) is also automatically true in the present. Comparisons require evidence on the institutions and epochs under comparison.

Importantly, Seddon himself indicates a further limitation by raising the potential of risk management as an explanation for some continuities in subsequent drug policy. He frames this as a claim that requires empirical verification, not as a verified outcome of the paper (2007, p. 153). But this is a crucial distinction to maintain if we are to employ historical scholarship in a considered way.

What this history changes

The historical record of heroin regulation in Britain demonstrates that in addition to its scientific underpinnings, there is a social history of drug policy. Pharmacy controls, international agreements, criminal statutes, medical prescriptions all have a history of institutional decisions. Ultimately, they came together in the way that they did according to assumptions about government, responsibility and populations needing intervention (Seddon, 2007, pp. 152-154).

The knowledge that these decisions occurred makes current practices amenable to inspection. We should think about how access is managed, what counts as expert knowledge and what the implications of categorising someone as a patient or offender are. It invites consideration of the dynamics between care, professional authority and coercion.

There is no implication from historical contingency, as Seddon doesn’t suggest, that we should want unconstrained access. Rather, it dispels the notion that an apparently inevitable regulation is what we have (2007, pp. 153-154). By casting doubt on this, the substantive question becomes how to evaluate specific policies in light of the available evidence of their impacts, while considering the underlying values and power relations they embody.

References

1. Dangerous Drugs Act 1920, 10 & 11 Geo. 5 c. 46 (UK).
   https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/10-11/46/pdfs/ukpga_19200046_en.pdf
2. International Opium Convention. (1912, January 23). Unofficial English translation reproduced in Papers relating to the foreign relations of the United States, 1912 (Document 306). U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian.
   https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1912/d306
3. Seddon, T. (2007). The regulation of heroin: Drug policy and social change in early twentieth-century Britain. International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 35(3), 143–156.
   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsl.2007.05.001
4. World Health Organization. (2025, August 29). Opioid overdose.
   https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/opioid-overdose

About this essay. This essay is an interpretive discussion of published research. Its account of Garland’s theory, the Rolleston Report, and the earlier historical literature is drawn from Seddon (2007). The 1912 treaty text, the original 1920 Act, and the WHO fact sheet were consulted separately. Page numbers refer to the printed pagination of Seddon’s article.

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