ABSTRACT
A willingness to take medicines seems to be one of the most fundamental of human attributes. Of the enormous variety of drugs which doctors prescribe or which we prescribe for ourselves, many have effects on mood or experience. It seems that the use of such psychotropic drugs is ubiquitous. In all human societies past and present psychotropic drugs have been used avidly either in attempts to escape from unpleasant reality and achieve some transcendent or heavenly state or, alternatively, to return abnormal mental states to normality. Thus psychopharmacology, which in the most general meaning of the term refers to the study of the ways in which drugs alter psychological processes, has a long history and a broad scope. However, it has been only within recent decades that the investigation of psychotropic drug action has become an empirically based and sophisticated scientific discipline.
