Some Speculations on U.S. Drug Use.

This paper distinguishes three principal purposes of drug use: for social control, for pleasure, and for medical and quasi-medical reasons. The argument is made that a traditional view of the future as a leisure society may lead us to focus disproportionately on forms of drug use that have a pleasure or "mind expansion" motive. While acknowledging the likelihood of more drug use of these kinds, the authors offer a number of reasons why the greatest increase in drug use and the social problems it causes may, in a 20 or 30 year perspective, be in the area of medical prescription and self- doctoring for anxieties and behavioral abnormalities. The overlap of this area with the use of drugs for social control is identified as posing formidable ethical problems. The paper concludes with a speculative description of all the roles of mind-affecting drugs in the U.S. culture in the year 2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]