Drug use by adolescents is usually viewed as the result of personal vulnerability to peer pressures or drug pushers. This book provides a new perspective which is sociological rather than epidemiological, understanding patterns of drug-taking in the context of ordinary social interaction. In this social worlds analysis, adolescents' own concerns with boredom, depression, social identity, friendship, access to drugs, self-control and folk pharmacology replace the professionals' focus on deviant behaviour. Both drug-taking and drug-abstaining are analysed as decisions made within social worlds...

Without of course adopting a Platonic metaphysics, the eighteenth-century philosophes were Grecophiles who regarded the Athenian philosophers as their intellectual forbearers and mentors. So powerful was their identification with c1assification that ancient ideas were taken as keys to the design of the modem world, but usually the ideas were taken separately and as divided from their systematic context. The power of number was an idea the En- lightenment thinkers deployed with their legendary passion and vigor, particularly as an instrument for social reconstruction. It is no exaggemtion to...