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.
Cross-cultural and Traditional Drug Use
Cross-cultural and Traditional Drug Use
Drug use takes place in all sorts of contexts and locations. Sometimes by studying behaviours or actions such as drug use in different contexts, we find that things we assume from our experience to be either ‘natural’ or universal outcomes of that behaviour may not occur in the same way or even at all when looked at elsewhere. Traditional drug use refers to forms of drug use long embedded in a society's day-to-day life and/or traditions. In this section we will look at examples from tribal and other non-Western societies. Cross-cultural drug use refers to examples of drug use within different types of culture. This can be subcultures within a society such as the USA ...
