Use Drugs are both chemical substances and social, cultural, and symbolic phenomena that are perceived, dealt with, and used in certain ways by the general society and by groups within it. We must therefore examine the social climate surrounding drug use in order to understand its causes, extent, and consequences.

Sociological factors always affect a drug's pharmacology. It Is a bit misleading to discuss the effects of drugs without emphasizing that drug effects are dependent or contingent on a number of key factors. What a drug does to the mind and body of a user depends on how it is taken..

Drugs never do anything in the abstract. While different drugs do have a certain potential for specific effects on humans, whether this potential is actually realized is not a simple matter of biochemistry. All drug use takes place within a certain social context or setting. Customs and personal factors determine key variables that may, in turn, have strictly physical effects.

That a drug can have certain effects on humans in a hospital or a clinical setting or on animals in a laboratory, is no assurance that it will do so in real life, in actual drug-taking situations, simply because people in the street may not take it the way experimenters administer it in a research context..

For instance, alcohol does have the effect of debilitating motor coordination. But it is people who decide whether or not to drive while intoxicated. These are social, cultural, and personal considerations; they are not dictated by the objective properties of the drug itself. As we'll see in the chapter on alcohol, this drug's effects are highly variable from one culture to another.

It is the custom to chew coca leaves in the South American Andes. In the United States, this is a highly unusual method for ingesting cocaine; recreational users here generally sniff or snort doses containing 10 to 50 percent cocaine..

Again, the sociological factors surrounding the use of cocaine determine how it is used—and, as a consequence, what effects it has. The cocaine Americans take to get high is diluted as a result of the drug's criminal status: Here, too, sociological factors enter the picture. Pure cocaine may have specific effects on the human mind and body, but what users actually take is itself dependent on the type of society we live in..

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