Social pharmacology is the study of the influence of social and cultural variables on drug effects and use. It considers concepts and variables that in the past have been called “nonspecific” or “nonpharmacological” in nature. Social pharmacology refers to those variables that are not pharmaceutical in nature, but that still can have a profound influence on drug action and the occurrence of specific drug effects as perceived and interpreted by the user. Research on these variables, such as suggestibility, knowledge and information, user set, setting, and attribution, has been conducted for many years.
Social pharmacology provides a framework for identifying and classifying variables and how they function to modify drug action to produce drug effects in humans. It is the primary approach for integrating pharmaceutical variables with social and cultural variables to assist in explaining and understanding user-generated descriptions of their drug experiences, with the goal of improving outcomes of patient drug therapy.
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