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The purpose of this paper is to consider how policy researchers should respond to recent developments in substance use and the governance of drug and alcohol policy in the UK.

The paper takes two elements from the 2010 UK Drug Strategy – supply and treatment – and considers a case study in each to briefly examine the potential role of local policymakers in shaping how substance use is experienced.

It is argued that the Coalition Government’s health reforms have given local commissioners greater autonomy over treatment policy than they had under the preceding Labour Government. Similarly, the regulation of new psychoactive substances in the UK has left local areas to determine their own approach to controlling supply through retail outlets.

Drawing on the broader academic literature on policymaking, this paper calls for ethnographic research into local policymaking related to substance use, which will help to illuminate how perceived policy problems are shaped by particular local systems and understandings of evidence.

While this paper is not unique in identifying the importance of locally based research, it identifies the particular relevance of this research agenda in the UK today. It seeks to inform and encourage research that can shape the development of local policymaking.

IN the October number of THE BRITISH FOOD JOURNAL, while disclaiming any intention of supporting or opposing any political party or any section of politicians, we stated our opinion that the fiscal policy which has been outlined before the country by Mr. CHAMBERLAIN is eminently one which requires to be put to the test of experiment and which cannot be profitably argued about upon theoretical bases. In connection with the allegation that by following the policy of leaving our doors open to those who shut their own doors in our faces, we are able to obtain goods at less expense than would be the case under other conditions, we pointed out that it would be well for the public to consider whether that which is so cheap may not also, to a great extent, be particularly nasty. The desirability of considering the nature and quality of so‐called “ cheap ” foods, supplied to us by various countriies without restriction, does not, as yet, appear to have entered the heads of those who have made matter for political controversy out of what is, in reality, a scientific question. The facts are not sufficiently known, or, in consequence of the proverbial carelessness of our generation, are not clearly appreciated. And yet, as it seems to us, some of those facts are of paramount importance to those who desire to study the subject in a calm and scientific manner and outside the region of political turmoil. What do we get from the various countries whose producers and merchants are free to “dump” their goods in this country without the restrictive influence of duty payments? Great Britain has made it known to all the world that “Rubbish may be Shot Here,” and we venture to say that the fullest advantage has been taken, and is taken, of the permission. From America, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, and Belgium, in fact from every producing country—including now even Russia and Siberia, we get inferior or scientifically‐adulterated articles which are sold to the public “ cheap.” Milk and butter scientifically adulterated, or produced under improper conditions in such a way that their composition becomes the same as physically‐adulterated products, condensed “milk” minus cream, cheese practically devoid of fat, or “ filled ” (as it is called) with margarine, all reach us in enormous quantities from most of our near and dear neighbours. Butter and certain wines and beers, loaded with injurious ‘ preservative” chemicals and the sale of which is prohibited in the country of production, are sent to the easily‐entered British “dumping‐ground” for the delectation of its confiding inhabitants. “Tinned” foods prepared from raw materials of inferior character or of more than questionable origin, are copiously unloaded on our shores to feed our complaisant population,—instead of being consigned to the refuse destructors which should be their proper destination; while, every now and then, when something worse than usual has been supplied, representative specimens of this delectable class of preparation are proved to have caused outbreaks of violent illness—those so‐called ptomaine poisonings which, of late years, have increased in number and in virulence to so distinctly alarming an extent. Flour made from diseased or damaged grain, or itself “ sick ” or damaged, and so “ processed ” as to mask its real condition; flour, again, adulterated with other and inferior meals, are “ goods ” supplied to us in ample amount for the benefit of those whose mainstay is some form of bread or flour‐food. The list might be continued literally ad nauseam.

The Standing Committee of the House of Commons on Trade, presided over by LORD E. FITZMAURICE, met again on July 16th and proceeded with the Sale of Adulterated Butter Bill.

As UK substance misuse policy has increasingly focused on the concept of recovery, policymakers, service providers and service users have found “recovery capital” a useful concept to understand the barriers to and facilitators of recovery from substance misuse. There is a rich strand of research that considers the composition of recovery capital in terms of the relevance of resources such as access to mutual aid, familial support and friendship networks, stable housing, structured psychosocial support and education, training and employment. However, such general accounts have tended not to engage with the potential spatial element of recovery capital; that is, how location contributes to the acquisition and management of recovery capital. The purpose of this paper is to add nuance to more generalised accounts through a critical interrogation, exploration and analysis of the role of geography in recovery.

The paper draws on in-depth interviews with service users and service providers in a predominantly rural county in the south-west of England.

The ability to build and sustain recovery capital is shown to be marked by a complex web of social and spatial inclusions/exclusions.

This paper makes three important contributions to prevailing understandings of recovery capital. First, it shows how narratives of recovery are intimately tied to perceptions and experiences of place. Second, it reveals some of the important challenges and complex dilemmas that local drug and alcohol commissioners face in designing and delivering recovery-orientated treatment systems. Third, and finally, it argues that there is a pressing need for a more nuanced appreciation of the social and spatial dynamics of recovery capital.

The question of the best commercial method of retailing milk requires to be dealt with from the various standpoints of the different classes of milk vendors.

All items listed may be borrowed from the Aslib Library, except those marked, which may be consulted in the Library.

Lager beer is a bottom fermentation beer which is characterised by having in general a low alcohol content and a high proportion of extractive matters in comparison with the top fermentation beer that is still, by far, the main brew of this country. It may be pointed out that in the top fermentation process the variety of yeast which is used rises to the top of the liquid in the fermentation vat. In the bottom process the yeast sinks to the bottom, and fermentation takes place at a lower temperature. Lager has been described, among other things, as “liquid food” as an aperitif; as a non‐intoxicant. It would therefore seem to possess a rare combination of good qualities. While we submit that excessive praise may be sometimes almost as effective as an agent of damnation as faint praise, there is no doubt that genuine lager beer is a thoroughly wholesome drink.

After great Wars, the years that follow are always times of disquiet and uncertainty; the country is shabby and exhausted, but beneath it, there is hope, expectancy, nay! certainty, that better times are coming. Perhaps the golden promise of the fifties and sixties failed to mature, but we entered the seventies with most people confident that the country would turn the corner; it did but unfortunately not the right one! Not inappropriate they have been dubbed the “striking seventies”. The process was not one of recovery but of slow, relentless deterioration. One way of knowing how your country is going is to visit others. At first, prices were cheaper that at home; the £ went farther and was readily acceptabble, but year by year, it seemed that prices were rising, but it was in truth the £ falling in value; no longer so easily changed. Most thinking Continentals had only a sneer for “decadent England”. Kinsmen from overseas wanted to think well of us but simply could not understand what was happening.

Knight's Industrial Law Reports goes into a new style and format as Managerial Law This issue of KILR is restyled Managerial Law and it now appears on a continuous updating basis rather than as a monthly routine affair.

It is customary these days to denounce our society for its unconscionable neglect of the elderly, while we look back romantically to some indeterminate past when the elderly were respected and well cared for. Contrary to this popular view, old people historically have enjoyed neither respect nor security. As Simone de Beauvoir so effectively demonstrates in The Coming of Age (New York: Putnam, 1972), the elderly have been almost universally ill‐treated by societies throughout the world. Even the Hebrew patriarchs admonished their children to remember them as they grew older: “Cast me not off in time of old age; when my strength fails, forsake me not” (Psalms 71:1). Primitive agrarian cultures, whose very existence depended upon the knowledge gleaned from experience, valued their elders, but even they were often moved by the harsh conditions of subsistence living to eliminate by ritual killing those who were no longer productive members of society. There was a softening of societal attitudes toward the elderly during the period of nineteenth century industrial capitalism, which again valued experience and entrepreneurial skills. Modern technocratic society, however, discredits the idea that knowledge accumulates with age and prefers to think that it grows out‐of‐date. “The vast majority of mankind,” writes de Beauvoir, “look upon the coming of old age with sorrow and rebellion. It fills them with more aversion than death itself.” That the United States in the twentieth century is not alone in its poor treatment of the aged does not excuse or explain this neglect. Rather, the pervasiveness of prejudice against the old makes it even more imperative that we now develop programs to end age discrimination and its vicious effects.