Project Details
Projekt
Berlin on drugs. Heroin use in the „Mauerstadt“ between psychiatric reform and AIDS phobia in the 1970s and 1980s.
Applicant
Professor Dr. Thomas Beddies
Subject Area
History of Science
Modern and Contemporary History
Modern and Contemporary History
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 419057548
AbstractAt the beginning of the 1970s, heroin became the dominant substance among banned drugs in West Germany and West Berlin. Urban drug scenes and junkies attracted public attention and revealed not only executive power and the courts to be overwhelmed, but also an overstrained psychiatry with its concepts and institutions, which was undergoing a profound reform process.The project aims to identify and analyze the phenomena that defined how society viewed the heroin problem and dealt with heroin users in the 1970s and 1980s. It takes into account that substance-related addiction should not be seen as a solely pathophysiological fact, but that there are also legal, social and medical fields of tension created and determined by definition processes and interest-based policies.The psychiatric developments as well as the overall societal developments (associated with the „Pychiatrie-Enquete“ and the emergence of HIV/AIDS) will be included as relevant influencing factors in this context, the assumption being that in the drug-context both phenomena largely contributed to „eroding the difference between crazy and normal“ as explained in the research group’s proposal. Heroin addiction was a phenomenon that not only caused individual illness and heavy mental distress. It was furthermore a societal problem that seemed to justify „extra-ordinary", sometimes questionable, measures. Reactions ranging between penalization and acceptance of heroin use led to the loss of the psychiatric monopoly when it came to the interpretation and treatment of drug addiction and to a diversification (and a new complexity) in drug policy and in dealing with consumers, a diversification that continues to have an effect to this day.
DFG Programme
Research Units
