Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Drugs, addiction and behaviour
- 2 Drug dependence in the UK – and elsewhere
- 3 Drugs of abuse and dependence
- 4 Alcohol
- 5 Assessment
- 6 General measures of intervention
- 7 Specific methods of treatment
- 8 Complications of drug abuse and their treatment
- 9 Special problems
- 10 Follow-up and treatment outcome
- 11 Prevention of drug abuse
- 12 The law and drug control policies
- Appendices
- References and further reading
- Index
1 - Drugs, addiction and behaviour
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Drugs, addiction and behaviour
- 2 Drug dependence in the UK – and elsewhere
- 3 Drugs of abuse and dependence
- 4 Alcohol
- 5 Assessment
- 6 General measures of intervention
- 7 Specific methods of treatment
- 8 Complications of drug abuse and their treatment
- 9 Special problems
- 10 Follow-up and treatment outcome
- 11 Prevention of drug abuse
- 12 The law and drug control policies
- Appendices
- References and further reading
- Index
Summary
What is a ‘drug’?
There are several possible definitions of a drug, as the examples below will show, but all have their limitations.
‘A substance which, when injected into a rat, produces a scientific paper’ – facetious, certainly, but probably accurate.
‘A substance used as a medicine in the treatment of diagnosed mental or physical illness’. This definition is based on the shifting sands of therapeutic efficacy; coffee, cannabis and tobacco were used in times gone by for their medicinal properties and, accordingly, would then have been classified as drugs. Nowadays, however, all would escape that definition, a decision that would make most people uneasy, certainly as far as cannabis is concerned, and perhaps for tobacco and coffee too.
‘Any chemical substance, other than a food, that affects the structure of a living thing’. This too is unsatisfactory because there are a few substances generally considered to be drugs which are also consumed as foods. Alcohol is the obvious example, but there are others: some mushrooms would be ‘food’ while others would be drugs; caffeine, obtained in coffee jars from the supermarket, is perceived as a food, whereas in tablet form from the chemist, it is considered a drug. A drug is ‘any substance, other than those required for the maintenance of normal health, which, when taken into the living organism, may modify one or more of its functions’. This very broad definition was developed by the World Health Organization (WHO), and had the advantage of being used and understood internationally.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Drugs and Addictive BehaviourA Guide to Treatment, pp. 1 - 22Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002