The origins of the English drug "scene" 1890-1930.

The drug subculture which developed as part of the rise in narcotic drug use in the 1960s has received much attention. Academic sociologists and the media found this, as an area of deviant behaviour, a subject ofconsiderable intellectual interest and also of popular fascination. Drug taking as an alternative way of life, where, as Jock Young puts it, "drug use is given a different meaning from that existing previously", has become part of the sociology of deviance. Issues such as the formation and role of the altemative subculture, the social reaction against deviant drug use, and the particular importance of the changing social class of drug takers as providing justification for a moral response, have attracted attention. The transformation of the typical drug user in the 1960s from a middle-class middle-aged female into a young working-class male had, it is argued, much to do with the social reaction evoked, and the type of legal and social controls put into effect.' In the 1980s, the link with unemployment has again been stressed; and the reappearance of cocaine as a "smart" drug has also provided another source of sensationalism for the popular press. However, the widespread assertion that drug taking has now become more "normal" would seem to downgrade the '60s emphasis on drug use as a subcultural activity.2 Certainly, the "junkie" stereotype is less prominent in media coverage. The historical analysis of how such groupings came to emerge, and their earlier antecedents, has been scanty. In other areas of deviance, the historical formations have begun to be analysed. Weeks' work on homosexuality, for instance, has traced the construction of a homosexual personality and "role" together with a separate homosexual way of life.3 Walkowitz's study of prostitution in Plymouth and Southampton has likewise shown how female prostitution, once one of a range of activities open to working-class girls, gradually became defined as an "exclusive" and separate occupation and way of life, accompanied by residential segregation.4 The