ABSTRACT
Surveys of the use of mood- and mind-altering substances such as tobacco and marijuana, alcoholic beverages, and psychotropic drugs indicate their widespread usage, despite the continuing public education as to their hazards. Phenomenological analysis would suggest that the resort to drug usage is apparently the manifestation of a person’s desire to change his present emotional state for a more desirable one. The actual ingestion of the drug substance may follow a somewhat circuitous course beginning with smoking and/or drinking, proceeding to the oral ingestion of various types of nonnarcotic psychotropic drugs, i.e., sedatives, stimulants, hallucinogens, and minor tranquilizers. The choice of a specific drug derives from the mutual interaction of the psychodynamic meaning and pharmacogenic effect of the drug with the particular conflicts and defects in a person’s psychic structure. The origins of preferential drug abuse may be drug-induced alter ego states which seek to recapture experiences, the origins of which appear to lie in specific phases of childhood development.
