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Social Policy and Drug Research Paper

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Social Policy and Drug Research
by Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The major idea that the author discussed in this article was how current social policy is aimed at decreasing the use of illegal substances? The question progresses whether research efforts must stick to this policy in order to be considered ethical. If research is to be judged in fair terms, what effect does this have on the selection of research projects to be funded, how the research is done? and how the findings are treated by the public, as represented by both professionals and the media? All these questions need to be taken into considerations while looking at this current social policy. The author presented to us that we have to understand what is causing this …show more content…

One general idea he put out there to the public was “Drug use-and abuse-represents simply one more instance of the impact of technology on society”. The author supported his statement by saying how “this is the central experience of modern society. At one or two removes, most of the ills we suffer are the consequences of technology. That is to say, the bad results that accompany the good ones- good results which led to the adoption of the technology in the first place.”
To date, there are five large and important areas of research that have been either neglected: (1) the sequence of drugs used and the development of different drug-using patterns; (2) the individual, group, and cultural factors influencing low-risk and high-risk outcomes among equivalent drug users; (3) the changing attitudes of both users and nonusers toward psychoactive drug use; (4) the impact of the media on drug use and drug choice; and (5) the process of socialization as it applies to patterns of drug use (http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/zinberg7.htm). I feel that we should also focus on studies: how drugs influence individual health and behavior, what use is being made of drug research, and how its findings influence public policy decisions.
I hope that this drug research will stimulate other investigators/researchers to accept long-term, studies of psychoactive drug-using behavior as a

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