Summary
Contents
How do we understand drug use? How are drugs related to our social worlds? How should drug use be understood, approached and dealt with? Insightful and illuminating, this book successfully discusses drugs in social contexts. In an elegant manner, the authors bring together their different theoretical and practical backgrounds, offering a comprehensive and interdisciplinary introduction that opens up a wide scientific understanding moving beyond cultural myths and presuppositions. Powerful and engaging, this book discusses main questions within the field of psychoactive drugs research, such as: Why do people take drugs? How do we understand moral panics? What is the relationship between drugs and violence? How do people's social positions influence their individual involvement in drug use? This is an invaluable reference source for students on criminology, sociology and social sciences programmes, as well as students and drug service practitioners in social work, social policy and nursing.
Drug-related Violence
Drug-related Violence
The concept of drug-related violence refers to the idea that particular drugs induce the user towards an aggressive or violent state. It also denotes a statistical association between drug use and/or selling and some kind of violent outcome.
There is a common assumption that alcohol and particular street drugs make people commit acts of violence. This is a view often reinforced by the regular reports of alcohol-fuelled violence and of drug-crazed murderers in our popular mass media and various statistics on crime showing strong links between the use of alcohol and/or street drugs and violent outcomes. Broadly, although the actual statistics differ, they provide a broadly similar picture in many countries. Illustrative of this broader picture, Roizen (1997) has estimated that up ...