1 The Past: Heroin Maintenance and the Epidemic of Addiction in England, to 1968

My first encounter and only personal experience with heroin took place in 1966, when I was living in London. What everybody knows about the British and heroin is that they supply it on prescription to heroin addicts. But my first sight of the drug seemed to have nothing to do with addicts. My elder daughter, then seven, had caught a cold and developed a hacking cough. The doctor listened at her bedside—English doctors still sometimes call at bedsides—and then wrote out a prescription for cough medicine. As we left together, I on my way to the pharmacist's, I glanced at what he had written, and disentangled the words "elixir diamorphinae."