Introduction

As long as human beings have pondered the behaviour of their fellow creatures they have doubtless been puzzled why some of them persist in drinking alcoholic beverages in a way which obviously does them harm. It was during that momentous epoch in human history, the closing years of the eighteenth century, that scientific explanations began to be proposed for this central theoretical problem - or, at least, explanations which appeared to be scientific in the intellectual climate of the period. In relation to drug misuse of all kinds, the semantic confusion surrounding various terms like addiction, dependence and habituation became an object of concern for the WHO Expert Committee on Addiction-producing Drugs which reported in 1964. The essentialist tradition assumes that our concepts, including scientific concepts, describe things which are really there in nature, and therefore, from this point of view, our question would be quite acceptable.