THE SUMMER OF LOVE - WHEN DRUGS WERE NOT A PROBLEM

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.