Editing Pete Townshend (section)

=== Drug rehabilitation ===
Townshend has also advocated for [[drug rehabilitation]]. In a 1985 radio interview, he said:

{{blockquote|What I'm most active in doing is raising money to provide beds in clinics to help people that have become victims of drug abuse. In Britain, the facilities are very, very, very lean indeed&nbsp;... although we have a national health service, a free medical system, it does nothing particularly for [[List of controlled drugs in the United Kingdom|class A]] drug addicts – [[cocaine]] abusers, heroin abusers&nbsp;... we're making a lot of progress&nbsp;... the British government embarked on an anti-heroin campaign with advertising, and I was co-opted by them as a kind of figurehead, and then the various other people co-opted me into their own campaigns, but my main work is raising money to try and open a large clinic.}}{{citation needed|date=March 2024}}

The "large clinic" Townshend was referring to was a drug treatment facility in London that he and drug rehabilitation experimenter [[Meg Patterson]] had devised, but the plan failed to come to fruition. Two early 1979 concerts by the Who raised £20,000 for Patterson's Pharmakon Clinic in [[Sussex]].<ref>{{Cite web |last=des Chenes |first=Josema |date=2013-08-08 |title=Dreams and Music |url=https://josemadeschenes.wordpress.com/ |access-date=2024-06-14 |website=josemadeschenes.wordpress.com |language=en}}</ref>

Further examples of Townshend's drug rehabilitation activism took place in the form of a 1984 [[benefit concert]] (incidentally the first live performance of Manchester band [[the Stone Roses]]), an article he wrote a few days later for Britain's ''[[Mail on Sunday]]'' urging better care for the nation's growing number of drug addicts, and the formation of a charitable organisation, Double-O Charities, to raise funds for the causes he'd recently championed.{{citation needed|date=March 2024}} Townshend also personally sold fund-raising anti-heroin T-shirts at a series of UK [[Bruce Springsteen]] concerts and reportedly financed a trip for former [[The Clash|Clash]] drummer [[Topper Headon]] to undergo drug rehabilitation treatment. Townshend's 1985–86 band, Deep End, played two benefits at [[Brixton Academy]] in 1985 for Double-O Charities.<ref>{{Citation |title=Pete Townshend's Deep End Live! - Pete Townshe... {{!}} AllMusic |url=https://www.allmusic.com/album/pete-townshends-deep-end-live!-mw0000650900 |access-date=2024-06-14 |language=en}}</ref>