A Sociological Perspective on Drugs and Drug Use
Erich Goode, Professor of Sociology at SUNY Stony Brook
From: Drugs in American Society, Chapter 1
©1972 Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. ISBN 0-394-31323-2

SOCIAL CONTEXT AND HUMAN MEANING
What can a sociologist tell us about drug use that we do not already know? If there is anything particularly distinctive about the sociologist's view, it is his emphasis on social context. It might appear that this concept seeped into the public consciousness long ago, that it is a banality. But if this were so, the stupendous blunders committed every day by drug researchers and commentators would not occur. If the concept were really understood, a large part of the drug problem would also be understood.
The social context of drug use powerfully influences—indeed, it might almost be said determines—at least four central aspects of the drug reality, aspects that traditionally have been presumed to grow directly out of the chemical and pharmacological properties of drugs themselves, independent of human intervention. These four aspects are drug definitions, drug effects, drug-related behavior, and the drug experience. The sociological perspective stands in direct opposition to what might be called the chemicalistic fallacy—the view that drug A causes behavior X, that what we see as behavior and effects associated with a given drug are solely (or even mainly) a function of the biochemical properties of that drug, of the drug plus the human animal, or even of the drug plus a human organism with a certain character structure. Drug effects and drug-related behavior are enormously complicated, highly variable, and contingent on many things. And the most important of these things are social and contextual in nature. In the animal world, it is quite a bit easier to predict what drugs will do. But experiments with rats do not tell us very much