After finishing this chapter, students should be able to understand:
American society has changed from being one that tolerated a wide variety of individual drug use to being one that attempts strict control over some types of drugs. This has occurred in response to social concerns about drug toxicity, addiction potential, and drug-related crime and violence.
Toxicity can refer either to physiological poisoning or to dangerous disruption of behavior. Also, we can distinguish acute toxicity, resulting from the presence of too much of a drug, from chronic toxicity, which results from long-term exposure to a drug.
Addiction means different things to different people in different contexts. Although addiction does not depend solely on the drug itself, the use of some drugs is more likely to result in addiction than is the use of other drugs.
The idea that narcotic drugs or marijuana can produce violent criminality in their users is an old and largely discredited idea. Narcotic addicts seem to engage in crimes mainly to obtain money, not because they are made more criminal by the drugs they take. One drug that is widely accepted as contributing to crimes and violence is alcohol.
We can see that the laws that have been developed to control drug use have a legitimate social purpose, which is to protect the society from the dangers caused by some types of drug use. Whether these dangers have always been viewed rationally, and whether the laws have had their intended results, can be better judged after we have learned more about the drugs and the history of their regulation.
