During the mid-1980s, British psychiatry erupted into a vehement debate about the disproportionate use of 'cannabis psychosis' as a clinical diagnosis amongst young Black men admitted into psychiatric care. Assessing contemporary suggestions that these unequal rates of diagnosis reflected elevated rates of drug use in Black communities more generally, this article uses sources such as the British Crime Survey to show that this was not the case. The article also questions why some psychiatrists nevertheless believed that Black communities were more likely to use drugs, locating such assumptions in the broader presentations of drug use amongst Black communities circulating in Britain at the time.
Abstract This article examines yaws control in colonial Nigeria and British Cameroons between the 1930s and the mid-1950s. It argues that penicillin temporarily obscured the uncertainties that characterised yaws control while exposing the limits of Western medicine and colonial healthcare. Before penicillin, medical officers struggled to distinguish yaws from syphilis and relied on serology, age, locality, and visible symptoms to interpret infections that available tests could not reliably differentiate. Arsenical and bismuth therapies were viable but depended on uneven institutions, including hospitals, Native Administration dispensaries, missionary medicine, travelling medical officers, and African auxiliaries. From the mid-1940s, penicillin appeared to simplify this therapeutic landscape by offering rapid treatment and making population-level control imaginable. Yet treatment at scale still required Medical Field Units, international drug supplies, trained intermediaries, local authorities, registration, and surveillance. Penicillin therefore produced a systemic interregnum, temporarily compensating for, while revealing, colonial rural healthcare’s fragility.
