Drugs and the Brain

for other reasons no doubt, the papers will be of unequal value to readers of 'Mental Health'. Paradoxically, those on the basic sciences may be of more use than those on the applied, despite the fact that they are by now three years out of date and that willingness to follow the leads provided into other literature will require a fair degree of sophistication. The other papers have little to say that is new, and do not always base themselves upon references. Their basic approach is certainly sympathetic, but not one that will strike the British reader as particularly revolutionary. Professor Brotman, for example, describing the cycle of 'self-fulfilling prophecy' completed by the problem of drug abuse, concludes that it is time for the purely medical and criminal attitudes to be replaced by a community mental health approach: this, he says, is one that 'views the problem as an interaction between the individual, the drug, and the environment.' There is unlikely to be much quarrel with this point of view in Britain, although accord