Drugs I, Society and Drugs and Drugs II, Students and Drugs provide information on the use of psychoactive drugs, including marijuana, LSD, heroin, alcohol, and the like. The work presented here, we hope, will help the reader to develop a perspective about these drugs, the conditions associated with their use, the kind of people most likely to use them, some of the results of their use, and the milieu—including attitudes, anxieties, and ideologies—in which drug use, especially social and personal drug use, is embedded. The need for additional information about drugs is apparent, for the United States and other Western nations are experiencing, especially among young people, dramatic changes in drug use habits. The information we have developed is by no means complete, nor does it assure an understanding of the rapidly changing drug scene; yet we trust that our observations—which embrace the history of drug use, cross-cultural comparisons, normal, hippie, and high school and college student use, along with data on drug effects, drug associations with crime, religion, educational status, and the like—will be useful.

Society and Drugs and Students and Drugs together represent an important portion of the investigations conducted by our psychopharmacology group at Stanford University and by our cooperating colleagues in other institutions. These drug endeavors began in 1960 with a cultural case study in Greece, reported in Drugs I, which was part of a larger program of investigation and innovation in public health and cultural medicine (see Health and Healing in Rural Greece, 1964). Beginning in 1962, our interests extended to a social-epidemiological study of LSD use and users (see Utopiates, 1964), went on to include an evaluation of treatment methods and problems for one group of drug disorders (see Alcoholism: Modern Psychological Approaches to Treatment, 1967)', and embraced an appraisal of the relationship between drug use and crime, suicides, and accidents (see President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, Task Force Report: Narcotics and Drug Abuse, 1967, and Task Force Report: Drunkenness, 1967). The present two volumes represent further inquiries. These attend primarily to the social use of psychoactive drugs, the correlates, background, and short-term consequence of that use, and the cultural, attitudinal, and interpersonal milieu in which sentiments and conduct focused on drugs arise and are expressed.

In all of these endeavors we have been seeking to identify factors associated with changing patterns of drug use, ones associated with observed constancies or similarities in use, outcomes, or associated beliefs, and to place the phenomena of individual drug use and reactions into a broad perspective. Thus, over the years, we have sought to specify the variety and patterns of drug use by individuals, groups, or populations; to compare persons in similar settings; to compare common cultures; to examine similarities and differences among cultures in their drug use; and to inspect historical patterns associated with drug diffusion, acceptance, and social reactions. We have sought to consider treatment in something of the same fashion as we did in our Alcoholism book—that is, comparatively, in terms of the efficacy of methods, and contextually, by examining social, moral, and administrative factors as well as clinical ones that affect treatment operation and outcomes. Throughout we have tried to maintain contact with individual cases and to link them—not forgetting the unique nature of the person, drug, group, or culture—to the larger context.

Even though the total number of individuals interviewed, observed, or completing questionnaires for the data reported here runs to about 20,000, and even though we have studied about 250 cultures as well as a variety of nations, historical events, and special groups, we are still in the frustrating position of having studied samples at moments in time rather than total populations continuously over time. Given such conditions, we must be cautious in generalizing, for our Western college students are not Midwestern rural ones, our hippies are in San Francisco and not in Boston, our cultural case study is of rural Greeks, not of Malayans or of people from Timbuktu, and our follow-up studies measure discrete rather than continuous events. Even so, we do generalize and imagine the reader will do the same, for in the absence of better data, one has to make do with the data at hand. As we trust that what we offer will open the door to greater understanding, so also do we trust that others will come through that open door with more and better information in the future.

Our study was made possible by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (MH-12286) and was conducted in cooperation with the Pharmacology Service Center and the Center for Drug Abuse of NIMH. Coordinators from the Pharmacology Service Center were Mitchell Baiter, Ph.D., and Jerome Levine, M.D., and from the Center of Drug Abuse, Roger Meyer, M.D. The coordinated study was directed by Richard Blum. In addition to support by NIMH, the project received on-campus financial support from the Urban Life Institute of the University of San Francisco, and the Office of the Dean of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University.

RICHARD H. BLUM
Stanford, California January 1969