Economic insecurity, welfare retrenchment and heroin use between the 1970s and 2000: a multi-cohort analysis

Drug use, especially of drugs such as heroin which are likely to lead to addiction and increased risks of morbidities and deaths, is a key concern for policy makers in many countries. The causes of drug use are sometimes presented as being individual-level factors, although it is often recognized that familial, community and regional processes can be at work too. Herein we explore the macro-level drivers of heroin use in Britain and the extent to which these were associated with a change in which social groups used heroin. We first establish the extent to which there were indeed ‘new’ heroin users, drawn from social groups which had not previously used this drug (such as the working class). We use two large scale, longitudinal and nationally representative samples to establish that there was, indeed, a new social base of heroin users which emerged during the 1980s. Having found that this group did exist, we then explore the long–term causal process for the creation of this ‘new’ group of users. In so doing, we point to the geographically-uneven consequences of governmental social and economic policies which increased feelings of insecurity and objective inequalities for those born in the mid- to late-1960s and early- to mid-1970s who grew up during what became Britain’s heroin epidemic of the 1980s.