In this book, Robert P. Stephens argues convincingly that the problems of drug use and abuse in Hamburg were a product not least of the affluence created by postwar West Germany's “economic miracle.” Drug culture since the nineteenth century had relied on opium and morphine. It now gave way to a widespread use of cannabis among the younger generation, and Hamburg's lively club scene became the center of a new drug culture that soon attracted the attention of the media and the authorities. By the mid-1970s, attention had grown into concern as producers in south and southeast Asia added heroin to their list of exports, attracting a new kind of hard-core drug user in Germany. Cannabis came to be seen as a “gateway drug” leading inevitably to heroin. The police came down hard on traffickers and dealers, but had little effect on controlling demand. Not surprisingly, this was linked by the media to the impact of the hundreds of thousands of Turkish and other Gastarbeiter who were coming to Germany looking for a livelihood in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The principal way of dealing with drug consumers since the late nineteenth century had been through the “youth protection paradigm,” in which social work agencies took control of those regarded as most at risk. But this was not very relevant to the new, largely middle-class drug users, whose habits owed much to the anomie and aimlessness created in segments of the younger generation by a crassly materialistic society. It was not individual weakness that led to drug abuse but broader social problems that had to be tackled by a new, therapeutic approach, in which individual medical treatment was linked to educational programs of one kind or another. On the left, the countercultural links of organizations such as Release proved unsuccessful, as they fell apart in internal squabbles over the extent to which they should share the revolutionary politics of the hard left. Liberal interventions trying to secure the decriminalization of cannabis met with a similar lack of success.

Aware of the appeal of drugs as an aspect of youth culture, the authorities launched a series of educational initiatives designed to tackle the problem in a way that young people would appreciate. Many of these were spectacularly misguided. In 1972, for example, a public health initiative put a comic strip entitled Wowman: The World's Most Famous Drug Dog into the pages of a comic-strip magazine, but they chose a magazine that had a poor circulation because its fees were lowest, and their message—featuring a talking dog that lost all its powers when it sniffed drugs—was both obviously didactic and hopelessly complicated, so that when readers of the magazine were questioned about it, only one percent could actually tell the interviewers who Wowman actually was. Similarly, a massive leafleting campaign ran into serious distribution problems, with more than 150,000 copies being delivered to one recipient who had not the faintest idea of how to get rid of them all; it was eventually run down when it was realized that it was failing to have an effect. In the end, the recession that began in the mid-1970s undermined the affluent youth drug scene and helped to focus attention on a small hard core of long-term heroin users, for whom policing rather than therapy was seen as the appropriate response.

Stephens has a fascinating story to tell, and he does it well. This book adds very considerably to our knowledge and understanding of the social history of West Germany in the 1960s and early 1970s. At the same time, it has some weaknesses. Too often, for example, “the Senate,” the government of the city-state of Hamburg, is treated as politically neutral; we do not really find out what the views of the main political parties were, and in general this book is an example of social history as “history with the politics left out.” A chapter on gender and drug use is confused in its argument and does not really fit in with the rest. The few glimpses we get of the stories of individual drug users seem to go straight from the official files onto the page without any humanity or individuality intervening, and this is a pity; it would have been good to have learned more about them.

The use of the empty and redundant concept of “modernization” adds nothing to the book's argument. The author never tells us clearly what is meant by “modernization,” but if by this he means the global extension of imperialist capitalism meshing with the improvement of living standards in the West, then this could equally be used to describe the conditions that underlay the rise of the opium trade in the mid-nineteenth century. Hamburg's role as one of the world's great seaports does not really receive enough attention in the book, and a brief comparison with the drug scene and attempts to deal with it in other countries would have been illuminating. Finally, there are a few regrettable errors that should be corrected if there is a reprint. The little street at the end of the Reeperbahn where the Star Club was located is called simply the Grosse Freiheit, not Grosse Freiheit Strasse (p. 60), similarly with the Grossmoordamm (p. 164); and the famous club in Liverpool was the Cavern Club, not the Cave Club: does nobody under the age of fifty remember the Beatles any longer?