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Because cocaine is illegal, everything about its social status remains half-concealed; because the large-scale interest in it is so recent, there has been little time for a new descriptive literature to accumulate. It is impossible to find out the true extent of the illicit traffic; no substantial public surveys on cocaine use and users are available; even arrest statistics are unreliable, because the Federal Bureau of Investigation continues to lump cocaine with opiates (as a "narcotic") in its Uniform Crime Reports. Most important of all, the situation is changing fast; no stable pattern has yet emerged either in the use of the drug or in attitudes toward it. What we write today may seem naive or outdated in a year or two. In this kind of situation two poses are common: the spurious knowingness of the insider who imagines his own experience to be more extensive or more representative than it is; and the journalistic sensationalism of the outsider cashing in on the shock value of illicit drug use.

One topic usually considered to be an integral part of the sociology of contemporary drug use is clearly of more permanent interest than the latest fashion or scandal. This is the problem defined as "the motivation of the user." Unfortunately, in studies of illicit drug use the answer to an apparently sensible question is often pursued in a confusing and misleading way. In this case, it can degenerate into attempts to find ways to impute psychological abnormalities or moral deficiencies to those who use a socially disapproved drug. Consider two relatively harmless substances, marihuana and coffee. Only corporate marketing research divisions have shown much interest in why people drink coffee; but sociologists, psychiatrists, and - more ominously - police agencies are interested in the motivation of the user of marihuana. It is false to imply that something must be wrong with anyone who wants to ingest a chemical that has been declared legally out of bounds.

The question of why people want to use a drug, formulated in a general way, is both too simple and too complex to be very useful. The simple answer is to describe the effects and point out that they are desirable. So the mildly derisive "explanation" some marihuana smokers give to sociologists who want to study their motivations is that the stuff makes them feel good, or some elaboration of that idea. On the other hand, what the researcher means when he speaks of motivation may have nothing to do with what people think or say they want. He may be concerned with a causal chain based on some idiosyncratic concatenation of individual psychology, cultural norms (including the way in which the use of the drug is defined in a particular society--its folklore and mystique), and the availability of the drug. In that case the answer to the question of motivation becomes part of the biography of the user and the history of the culture. In this sense, as opposed to the derisively simple sense we mentioned before, there is no single motivation or easily classifiable set of motivations for sniffing cocaine or smoking marihuana any more than for drinking alcohol or coffee.

In other words, motivation tends to be either obvious or irrelevant, and the term is too often used for the dubious purpose of setting apart a peculiar class of drug users from respectable society as outcasts and scapegoats. The search for motivation is properly redirected or transformed into three other projects: description of the drug's psychological and physiological effects; analysis of the difficult problem of so-called dependence, habituation, and addiction; and observation of the conditions and circumstances in which the drug is available at a given time in a given society. . .

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