Year: 2003
Type: letter
Abstract: Sir—I must reply to Griffith Edwards’ review of Bing Spear's Heroin Care and Control: the British System, which I had the privilege of editing [1,2]. The short, favourable review has a sting in the tail with the comment, ‘it is a little awkward not to know what she may have added and interpreted beyond the original draft’. I take it he says this because, in my editorial foreword, I said that some sections were obviously incomplete and I had used Bing's notes and my memories of many discussions with him to complete his book. I can assure potential readers that virtually every word in the book is Bing's own. The paragraph quoted in the review, which encapsulates his opinion of why the ‘treatment centre era was an unmitigated disaster’, appeared in a paper he wrote in 1995 (but was too ill to deliver) for the Summer University in Dinard, Brittany. A shortened version of this paper, which included the paragraph, was published in Druglink[3]. My editing consisted of reducing the length of Bing's original draft, creating chapters from his continuous narrative, rearranging some of the material, devising chapter titles and subheadings and writing the occasional linking sentence. When the author cannot be consulted, editing has to be something of a creative process because it involves deciding what to leave out without distorting his message. I cannot deny that I am guilty of toning down Bing's more acerbic remarks about some of the key players in the treatment field in the late 1960s and 1970s, and of one later commentator of the period, although I now regret removing his description of the Ministry of Health of the day as the Ministry of Stealth and Total Obscurity. I take comfort from Griffith Edwards’ description of the book as ‘quintessential Bing Spear’ and hope that it will ‘spark argument and debate’ without needless speculation about what I might ‘have added and interpreted beyond the original draft’.
Source: Addiction
Author: Joy Mott
Institution: Imperial College London
Language: English
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2014418608