Uploaded September 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Substance misuse is widespread in prison settings. Find out about the history of drug misuse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, alongside recent creative interventions to explain the dangers of drug abuse to young offenders and beyond.
This was an online event held in September 2025.
Speakers:
Janet Weston talks about the impact of the HIV and AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and 1990s on prisons and drug misuse. The emergence of HIV and AIDS in the early 1980s overlapped with a 'heroin epidemic,' and put prisons under new kinds of pressure; Janet reflects on the changes in policies and treatment around drug use that this prompted - and the limits of change, as far as healthcare in prisons was concerned. Janet is a historian and Director of the Centre for History in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine; her research and publications have addressed histories of mental health, public health, forensic psychiatry, and healthcare in prisons.
Denise Lyons shares the creation of the innovative ‘Biz in the Pris’ project, which involved people who work and live in secure environments in the creation of a comic book about addiction.
Substance misuse is widespread in prison settings. Find out about the history of drug misuse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, alongside recent creative interventions to explain the dangers of drug abuse to young offenders and beyond.
This was an online event held in September 2025.
Speakers:
Janet Weston talks about the impact of the HIV and AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and 1990s on prisons and drug misuse. The emergence of HIV and AIDS in the early 1980s overlapped with a 'heroin epidemic,' and put prisons under new kinds of pressure; Janet reflects on the changes in policies and treatment around drug use that this prompted - and the limits of change, as far as healthcare in prisons was concerned. Janet is a historian and Director of the Centre for History in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine; her research and publications have addressed histories of mental health, public health, forensic psychiatry, and healthcare in prisons.
Denise Lyons shares the creation of the innovative ‘Biz in the Pris’ project, which involved people who work and live in secure environments in the creation of a comic book about addiction.
