Ken Eckersley was born in 1927, and after a distinguished wartime educational career during which he served 3 years as a photographer in the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm, he was 2 years a Scoutmaster, followed by 3 consecutive terms as a local Councillor and Chairman of the Bingley Urban District Council (in the Shipley West Yorks Constituency), which he left only because of promotion to European Director of Textiles Merchandising for the multinational chemical and pharmaceutical giant Monsanto, based in Dusseldorf.

He is an author, lecturer, radio and TV broadcaster on drugs and crime. He has worked part-time on an unpaid voluntary basis in the drug prevention and rehabilitation fields since 1979 and full-time since 1992, and advises on the problems of drugs in the workplace, training in self-cure drug treatment, and the development of effective political, community, national and business policies for drug prevention and cure.

He also lectures widely across the U.K. and the E.U. on Drugs, Addiction, the developing Bio-Chemical Society and on policies for the creation of a Drug-Free Society.

He defines a cure of addiction as "comfortable abstinence for life" and holds that no-one can withdraw another individual from drug use. The addict himself is the only person capable of withdrawing himself.  As a result the only truly viable route is to train that individual in a workable method of withdrawal and recovery which he may then - of his own volition - apply to himself and his condition.

On this basis, there are numerous international rehabilitation centres which offer users:

1) Training in how to comfortably withdraw themselves from drugs, along with
2) Education in those modes of rehabilitation and living necessary to aid them in their abandonment of drug use, and
3) Training in how to recover from the residual effects on their live and livelihood of their earlier addiction, plus
4) Training in the avoidance and prevention of future drug use by themselves and others, with the goal of becoming contributing and productive members of society.

Such programmes stand completely outside the fields of treatment, care, counselling, use-advice, habit management, therapy, needle-exchange, substitution prescribing, nursing, medical detoxification and other interventions, etc., and stand solely and only in those fields of training and education which support the drug user's own abstinence intentions and goals.

This is, adult learning, self-improvement and development with a view to achieving knowledge about, responsibility for and control of themselves and their own lives, plus responsibility and respect for the lives of others in their environment.