This thesis presents an analysis of the evolution of drug policy that challenges the fundamental understanding of state power and its monopoly regarding drug problems. The research both mapped the changing nature of drug control in Edinburgh and reassessed how and where this policy was formed. The source of the major argument revolves around the twin themes of local governance and techniques of social control, namely in this case technologies of the self and criminalisation. The realisation of the importance of local governance and study research complicates our understanding of drug control. Policy formation becomes a problematized factor in deliberations on how and from where drugs are controlled. This research as designed to redress this important limitation. Governance here is not to be equated solely with government but can be exercised by any number of social bodies, departments, organisations and professional bodies, often with contingent rather than final results. The second organising theme of this thesis is similarly designed to enhance understanding of the character and meaning of the social control of intravenous drug use. The study is intended to demonstrate that drug control policy has a diverse nature neither found in the exclusive embodiment of repression or liberation; neither exercised by a single agency or a sole representative within one. Social control here is divided into an analysis of techniques of the self, directed towards the transformation of the individual, and criminalisation, aimed at the repression of the individual drug user. Chapters Three through to Four provide a detailed analysis of the evolution of intravenous drug policy in Edinburgh. The chapters are chronologically based on three distinct phases of the intravenous drug problem and policy. From a small problem in the seventies, through to the expansion of use and drug control in the eighties, the research finishes this triptych with an elaboration of policy in the age of AIDS and after. The last chapter, Five, details the use of similar techniques of drug control in other jurisdictions. Additionally, the notion of trans-local governance, existent between a number of European cities, extends understanding of developing sub-national arrangements concerning policy deploying outside, and sometimes in conflict with, the domain of national governments.