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and treatment, we can be cautiously optimistic that it could at
least be contained.
Patients, generally in the older age groups who, for a variety
of reasons, depend upon drugs for a pattern of living are usually
known to their own doctors. It is the adolescent and the illegal
use of drugs, often far from pure, which constitute the greatest
danger to the community and presents us with our most difficult
problems, both medical and social.
Drug dependence is a complex and emotive subject which is
not only a symptom but a cause of serious disruption in the life
of the community, but it would be fair to say that addiction is
seldom found in the emotionally normal or mature individual.
Nevertheless, there is growing public concern about the increase
in non-medical drug taking, especially among young people, for
the age at which this takes place for the first time continues
to fall. Moreover, with official and parental anxieties goes a
fear that this "soft-drug" beginning will eventually degenerate
into an addiction for the "hard" drugs. Drug-taking in these
terms is illicit so there is a real difficulty in being able to assess
the extent to which this is practised although it is believed that
thousands of children are now taking "blues" or other "soft"
drugs. A recent survey of 1,126 children in Yorkshire revealed
that 1 in 10 admitted taking drugs for purposes other than
medical and that teenage children are raiding the family medicine
chests for sleeping pills, "pep" pills, cough linctus and even
abducting solvents, cleaning fluids, fly sprays and glues, etc., for
experimental use. It is indeed fortunate that with most children
the practice is very quickly abandoned and although some, a
minority, become attracted to cannabis or even L.S.D., very few
finish up as hardened addicts to heroin or its associates. However,
we do know that 40% of registered heroin addicts started
on drugs before the age of 18 years and that some 14-year-olds
are addicted to other substances.
In some parts of the world, inhalation of fumes from plastic
and rubber cements, paint thinners, nail polish removers, lighter
fuels, etc., is becoming a group activity. The fact that recently,
in England and Wales, several young people are known to have
died from this cause gives rise to concern lest this may presage
its wholesale adoption in this country. In California, since its
discovery in the late 1950's, this habit has caused at least 110
deaths and 50 similar deaths in young people have been reported
in Sweden during the last few years.
Failure of society to control powerful euphoriant chemicals
has undoubtedly been an important contributory factor in the