Cultural Aspects and Responses to Addiction

Abstract

The use of psychoactive substances and our interpretations of the effects of the substances are affected by culture, defined broadly to include social worlds and subcultures as well as tribal, societal, and linguistic groupings. Prototypical patternings of use include medicinal use, customary regular use, and festival and other intermittent uses (where the psychoactivity is most attended to). A fourth pattern, addictive or dependent use, was a conceptualization arising after the Enlightenment. Cultural norms may both encourage and discourage use and heavy use and may make the use more or less problematic. Cultural factors also shape responses to substance use, including the social handling of problematic situations and persons. Thus, there are characteristic differences between cultures in the institutional and professional location of the handling of substance use problems. In the modern world, there is substantial diffusion of practices and understandings between cultures, and in multicultural societies, drinking or drug use patterns often serve as markers of cultural distinctions. Despite all the diffusion, there are persisting cultural differences in thinking about, patterns of, and responses to psychoactive substance use.