Thomas S. Weinberg - The American Drug Culture

Sara Miller McCune founded SAGE Publishing in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. SAGE publishes more than 1000 journals and over 800 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas. Our growing selection of library products includes archives, data, case studies and video. SAGE remains majority owned by our founder and after her lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures the companys continued independence.

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The original reason for writing this book is mysterious, even to us, the authors. In the spring of 2013, Tom Weinberg found a contract for a book on alcohol in his mailbox. It had been signed by him, Gerhard (Gerry) Falk, and the publishers of a university press. What was puzzling was that it was dated 1983! Tom immediately took it to Gerry and asked him about it. It seems that Gerry had been going through some old papers in his office and came across the contract. Neither of us remembered sending in a proposal for such a book 30 years earlier or getting a contract for it. Why didnt we follow through on it? we asked each other. Neither of us could supply an answer. Nevertheless, we thought that a book on alcohol would be an interesting idea, so we sat down, outlined the chapters, and wrote it.

We quickly found out that this was no longer a topic of interest to the university presses, to which we sent a proposal and sample chapters, nor were small independent publishers interested in the project. We then decided that this was the kind of book more appropriate for a large textbook publisher. Tom contacted Jeff Lasser, his sociology editor at SAGE, for whom he and a colleague, Staci Newmahr, had earlier edited an anthology. Jeff was interested, but he suggested that we include other drugs to broaden its appeal. We did so, and the result is the book you are now reading.

As we thought about what the book should look like, Gerry suggested that we ask his wife, Dr. Ursula Adler Falk, to collaborate with us on the project. She is a psychotherapist who has worked with alcoholics and drug addictssome of whom are bothfor many years. He thought that the addition of case studies would be an important supplement to our text, broadening its appeal beyond sociology courses and enhancing its usefulness to students and faculty. Tom concurred. We have integrated some of the case histories into a couple of chapters, including , Becoming a Drug User: Careers, Personalities, and InteractionTwo Perspectives, cowritten with Dr. Ursula Adler Falk, which presents both the psychotherapeutic and sociological perspectives. In addition, the case histories are presented in two appendices. Appendix A contains the histories of Dr. Falks patients with alcohol use disorders, and Appendix B presents the case histories of those with substance use disorders. Case studies may be used in any number of ways, limited only by ones imagination. For example, students can use them as archival data for secondary analysis or to generate hypotheses about drug and alcohol abuse. For more advanced students, especially those interested in ethnomethodology and textual analysis,* they can be examined as texts, to understand how psychoanalysts conceptualize the situation and prognosis of their students.

* See Rod Watsons 2009 definitive work, Analysing Practical and Professional Texts: A Naturalistic Approach (Burlington, VT: Ashgate), for examples of how this might be done.

Our objective for this book is not only to help students understand alcohol and other drug use and abuse but, more important, to show them how sociological perspectives can be used in that process. To that end, , Alcoholism, explicitly label the sociological perspectives being used, whereas in other chapters, those perspectives are implicit.