Available online at www.sciencedirect.com International Journal of Drug Policy 19 (2008) 99–105 Historical analysis Women, harm reduction and history: Gender perspectives on the emergence of the ‘British System’ of drug control Toby Seddon * School of Law, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK Received 19 July 2007; received in revised form 26 October 2007; accepted 30 October 2007 Abstract Taking Kohn’s classic book Dope Girls as its starting point, this paper explores the particular place of women and gender issues in the emergence of the ‘British System’ of drug control in the early twentieth century. The ‘British System’ refers to the approach put in place in the 1920s in Britain, notably by the 1926 Rolleston Report. In essence, it involved the medically based prescription of opiates to addicts, often on a long-term basis. It is viewed by many as one of the beginnings of the general principle of harm reduction within drug policy. This paper will examine how female figures – chorus girls, actresses, night club girls, prostitutes – were central to British drugs discourse in the 1920s, with the representation of some individual women in particular, most famously the actress Billie Carleton, featuring very prominently. It will be argued that this gendering of drugs discourse can be best understood in the wider context of social change, namely the transition from liberalism to welfarism at the turn of the twentieth century. It is suggested that this historical analysis provides a radical new perspective on some fundamental issues for contemporary approaches to harm reduction for women, a perspective that has far-reaching implications and challenges some ‘taken-for-granted’ assumptions. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Gender; Women; Harm reduction; History; British System; Rolleston Introduction The famous ‘British System’ of drug control was assem- bled in the early 1920s and set out in the 1926 Ministry of Health Report of the Departmental Committee on Morphine and Heroin Addiction, known universally as the Rolleston Report after its chairman. At the heart of the committee’s report was the argument that for certain individuals for whom treatment had failed the ‘indefinitely prolonged administration of morphine or heroin may be necessary’ to allow them to lead a ‘normal and useful life’ (Ministry of Health, 1926). This humanitarian approach to addiction was much admired internationally – notably in North America which had adopted a more punitive approach with its 1914 Harrison Act (Schur, 1962; Lindesmith, 1965; King, 1972; Trebach, 1982) – and set a course for British drug policy * Tel.: +44 161 306 6549; fax: +44 161 306 1261. E-mail address: Toby.Seddon@manchester.ac.uk. that was largely unchanged until the 1960s (Berridge, 1980, 2005; Ashton, 2006). The ‘British System’ has come to be regarded by many commentators as one of the historical beginnings of the con- cept of harm reduction (McDermott, 2005, p. 139). The foremost historian of British drugs policy, Virginia Berridge, has observed that ‘harm-minimization itself is only a restate- ment in different circumstances of the principles enunciated in the Rolleston Report of 1926’ (Berridge, 1991, p. 196). At their heart, they share one key underpinning principle: given the reality of continuing drug use, efforts should be made to minimise the harms associated with it. Understanding the making of the ‘British System’ is therefore an important part of grasping the foundations of harm reduction, with the cen- tral ideas set out by Rolleston still strongly resonating with debates 80 years on (Ashton, 2006). The specific question for this paper though is this: can an historical perspective tell us anything about contem- porary harm reduction theory or practice as specifically applied to women drug users? In this respect, an observation 0955-3959/$ – see front matter © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.drugpo.2007.10.004