It’s all about context: The environment and substance use

The use of drugs and alcohol can be modified by the environment in a number of important ways, and this has implications in how we understand and treat drug use disorders. Discrete stimuli within an environment, as well as the environment itself (i.e. the drug context) can become associated with drug use, and in turn provoke the desire for or consumption of drugs or alcohol. Attempts to experimentally observe the development of these environment-drug interactions have helped refine knowledge of the psychological mechanisms in action, as well as assisting in the development of treatment strategies to reduce the effects of the environment on drug use. This chapter describes some of the ways the environment can modify and interact with drug use, with a focus on the standard experimental models used to observe these differing effects. We aimed to focus on the relevance of this research to the study of addiction, by considering the strengths of these models in their utility in developing psychological and therapeutic knowledge of context-drug interactions, as well considering some of the caveats in these research areas that could be a focus of future research.