There are principles of reinforcement in habit formation in order to understand how many people get so involved with drugs that they cannot let go. These principles are gaining ascendancy as the major theory of addiction to drugs like heroin and cocaine. But what are the major reinforcement factors? The drug taker – the cigarette smoker, alcohol drinker, tea sipper – is usually part of a social milieu in which the taking of a particular drug is common and approved.
He may be born into that environment, as the Irish are born into a drinking culture. Or, for a new experience, he may seek out a society or group where drug-taking is common. Experience-seeking is not necessarily related to drugs, however. Among the young, experimentation is as old as civilization. It has created a constant disturbance in society as, generation after generation, young people – particularly bright young people – attempted to break with the mores of their elders. With each generation, the fashion changes.
For some it has been social revolution, for others religious innovation; more recently it is sex and drugs, although neither of these was unknown in past generations. The creation of a particular fashion is not a well-understood phenomenon. We know that styles in clothing can be relatively easily manipulated by the trendsetters of Paris and New York. Something like may happen in behavior. The role of men like Dr. Timothy Leary, the apostle of LSD, in setting a trend among young intellectuals should not at all be underestimated.
For a time, Leary, a Harvard professor, seemed to have projected the authority in drug fashion of a Dior in clothes. An easy and popular generalization about drug-taking behavior is that it is a symptom of a “sick” society, a society that was until recently involved in a immoral war in Southeast Asia, is too affluent and materialistic while at the same time grinding down its minorities, particularly the blacks. In the absence of data, of course, any sort of theory seems plausible; for some people the mere assertion of a connection between drugs and a sick society proves the case.
They make an appealingly simple conclusion: if our society were not sick, there would be no drug problem. Consider the fact that, whatever the morality of the war in Southeast Asia, there has been a world-wide increase in the use of mood-changing drugs even in countries that were not involved in the war. England is an example. In my opinion, the war, for the theory to be plausible, should be a basic factor in most cases of increased national drug use. This is not the case though.