For so long confi ned to the margins of drug treatment services, social understandings are back in vogue. Mental health and addiction services social worker Daisy Bogg looks at how this is benefi ting service users
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ubstance misuse services have been social care’s poor cousins for so long it is barely imaginable that the UK once had a treatment system that was the envy of the world. The British
System, as it was known, viewed addiction as largely a health and social problem rather than a lifestyle or criminal choice, and it valued the contribution of social workers. It was in the 1960s and 1970s that attitudes hardened among the moralists who targeted drug misusers. The change of mindset evolved due to a combination of draconian international trade agreements, conservative leadership and an infl ux of cheap Chinese heroin in the 1980’s, which fl ooded the English council estates and made heroin use in particular a “working class” problem, all of which appealed to a society that was looking for scapegoats. At the same time the criminalisation and
medicalisation of addiction left social workers at the margins of treatment services.