© British Association of Social Workers
Deprivation and Drug Addiction*
A Study of a Vulnerable Sub-group
Gill Gorell Barnes read English at Cambridge and took a Diploma in Social Administration at the London School of Economics. After working in Islington Children's Department for 2 years she returned to the L.S.E. to read an M.Sc. in Social Administration. She works part-time in a Child Guidance Unit in North London: and after working for 2 years in the Maudsley Hospital Children's Department has now given up this part of her clinical work to do further research in the field of drug addiction and children 'in care', under the auspices of the Institute of Psychiatry.
Peter Noble is a consultant at the Maudsley Hospital. He has been involved in a number of research projects in the field of delinquency and drug addiction, and is at present concerned with studying effective liaison at community level between psychiatrists and social workers
Summary
The results of this survey confirm those of an earlier one,5 and suggest that a young person who both uses illicit drugs and has a history of court findings, either for delinquency or for 'being in need of care and protection', should be looked upon as at considerable risk for future progression to narcotic use. This progression is not simply a correlate of delinquency or of remand home admission, as only one out of 100 control admissions was discovered to have subsequently used narcotics. Moreover, this risk is not borne equally by all drug takers as, even on admission, there were significant mean differences between the progressor and non-narcotic groups. The items which were most effective in distinguishing the three groups were those relating to prior personality abnormality, prior psychiatric referral and difficulty in relating to their peers and to adults evidenced in their school and work reports. These differences are thus of prognostic importance and may aid the identification at an early stage of those soft-drug takers who are most vulnerable to the dangers of subsequent progression to narcotic and intravenous drugs