Dirty Drugs

Psychopharmaceuticals have a deep impact on our society. Klaus Ferdinand Gärditz deals with the rampant regulatory structures (from narcotics law to pharmaceutical law and the framework in constitutional law) and the interactions between psychopharmacology, society and the law with its institutional practices. Scientific knowledge has a formative influence on the law, but inversely symbolism, control instruments and occasionally prerational regulatory needs of the law have also had a formative influence on the origin and the handling of scientific knowledge. It is only due to its own distinctive history that pharmacological knowledge shows how regulatory needs originated and how a society which applies the law instrumentally to achieve social goals has perceived psychopharmaceuticals in the course of time. In addition, in order to understand the context, it is necessary to take a look at the neurochemical mechanisms.