ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the problem arising from the epidemiological or medicalized approaches to drug use. This chapter presents the conceptualization of the drug problem is informed less by the science of pharmacology and more by "a number of resistant primary drug myths", which provide a framework of fear that informs policy responses. It examines dominant approaches to drug research, and challenges the methodologies, assumptions, epistemological underpinnings and biases, and scientific, but also political and normative, consequences of this work. The concepts of addiction and "drug control" have imposed themselves as the unquestionable truths of drug issues. Pathologization and criminalization are the dominant perspectives on psychoactive drugs and it is difficult to describe drug consumption in words other than those of medicine or epidemiology or to conceive that regulation is not necessarily a matter of control and eradication.
