COMPLETE UPPERS, DOWNERS, ALL AROUNDERS,
7TH EDITION LATEST 2024
Uppers, Downers, All Arounders, 7th Edition –
Instructors Manual
Chapter 1 –
... [Show More] History
Chapter Overview
The first part of this chapter provides a historical survey of the pharmacologic and political
influences on the use of psychoactive substances and compulsive behaviors in all civilizations.
The second part presents a system for classifying these psychoactive substances along with major
legislation impacting use of drugs and treatment of addictions.
Throughout the last 10,000 years, humans have used psychoactive drugs to alter their perception
of reality for a variety of reasons. By studying the history of drug use and abuse, a number of
historical themes become apparent.
1. There is a basic need of human beings to cope with their environment and enhance
their existence.
2. Human brain chemistry can be affected by psychoactive drugs, behavioral addictions,
and mental illness to induce an altered state of consciousness.
3. The ruling classes, governments, and businesses have always been involved in trying to
control the drug trade, often using it as a source of revenue through trade and taxes.
4. Technological advances in refining, synthesizing, and manufacturing psychoactive drugs
have increased their potency and abuse liability.
5. Users and researchers have discovered new ways of taking drugs so they reach the
brain faster, thus increasing their abuse liability.
For example, opium was used originally for medicinal and spiritual purposes. Once people
discovered that opium created mental effects because of the way it manipulated the brain's own
natural chemicals especially endorphins, the body's own painkillers, they used it to change their
mental/emotional state. Legal, social, and health problems multiplied after people began to
smoke it, when it became a lucrative source of income for governments and trading companies,
when it was refined to the stronger morphine and heroin and when it could be delivered directly
into the bloodstream using a hypodermic needle.
The discovery of psychoactive plants (opium poppy, coca bush, coffee bean, Cannabis, and the
tobacco plant) and the subsequent synthesis of hundreds of other psychoactive substances, has
led to a medicine chest full drugs, most useful and some desirable but all causing problems when
abused.
Today alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, opioids (especially prescription drugs), crystal
meth, and ecstasy are the most widely used drugs. The recent development of synthetic
marijuana sold as
―herbal incense‖ and synthetic stimulants sold as ―bath salts‖ represent a great potential for a
renewed proliferation of traditionally dangerous ―designer drugs.‖ Behavioral addictions
(gambling, internet, shopping, sex, compulsive eating disorder) are now formally recognized as
addictions that affect the same natural brain chemicals and neural pathways as addictive
substances. The popularity of abusing specific psychoactive substances is cyclical; cocaine in
the 1880s, the 1910s and '20s, and the 1970s to '80s; opiates, beginning thousands of years ago
and continuing through numerous cycles to the present. By viewing these cycles and the themes
of drug use through the lens o [Show Less]