In the early 1970s, heroin became the dominant substance among illicit drugs in West Germany and West Berlin. Urban drug scenes and "junkies" attracted public attention and revealed an excessive demand not only on the executive power and the courts, but also on psychiatry, its concepts and institutions, which was undergoing a profound reform.

The intention is to identify and analyze those phenomena that determined the social view of the heroin problem and the treatment of heroin users in the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, the assessment is taken into account that substance-related addiction should not be understood solely as a pathophysiological fact, but that beyond this, definitional processes and interest-driven politics generate and determine legal, social and also medical fields of tension.

The "psychiatry inquiry" and the developments within psychiatry as well as in society as a whole associated with the emergence of HIV/AIDS are to be included as decisive influencing factors. According to the thesis, both phenomena contributed significantly to the "eroding difference between crazy and normal" in the context of drugs, as justified in the framework application. Forms of reaction between the poles of penalization and acceptance of heroin use led to the loss of the psychiatric monopoly in the interpretation and treatment of drug addiction, as well as to a diversification (but also a new confusion) in drug policy and in the treatment of users, which continues to have an effect to the present.