Environmental Factors in the Instigation and Maintenance of Drug Abuse

Abstract

This chapter is written with the hope that some of the facts presented might affect the way in which drug abuse is considered, and that this in turn would influence drug abuse policy. But one cannot be sanguine in this matter. Scientific explication all too often does not affect the framing of policy. Changes in the two realms are determined by quite different reinforcing events. Researchers are happy to provide solid facts to the makers of policy in the belief that good policy must necessarily be a function of good data and that erroneous notions can only lead to unworkable policies and grief. The production of reliable, interesting data is an activity that is reinforced by the scientific community in a variety of ways. In presenting even the most carefully controlled studies, scientists scrupulously indicate the provisional and contingent nature of results. After all, a larger context may reveal limitations to the conceptions that seem to follow from the results. Policy, however, operates under a different set of constraints. Its concepts must be initially acceptable— otherwise it has little chance of being implemented, regardless of the facts. The usual function of facts is to lend support to a policy’s intent, not to shape it. The production of an interesting policy is reinforced by a political community because it upholds a set of institutions and functionaries that are already operative. In a sense, a policy generates the kind of data that it requires as its raison d’être. Policy can be a closed, self-validating system, almost impervious to scientific facts: While science considers new facts and alternative explanations and rejects them on logical or empirical grounds, policy can be dismissive of facts and alternatives simply on the grounds that they are distasteful.