• Question: Are drugs just chemical substances?

    Asked by anon-256874 on 12 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Emma Daniels

      Emma Daniels answered on 12 Jun 2020:

      I don’t have a lot of experience working with drugs, but yes, drugs are chemicals that interact with proteins in the body to cause some sort of change. Drugs contain both active and inactive ingredients. The chemical that causes the desired effect is the active component, but often, only smalls amount of it are needed and it can be very expensive. So drugs can also contain inactive ingredients. These are other chemicals that don’t cause an effect in the body. These are used as fillers and binders, to help to drug stick together into a pill, for example. Maybe a scientist who works in making/testing drugs can add more to my answer?

    • Photo: James Beswick

      James Beswick answered on 12 Jun 2020:

      Emma has covered it really nicely in her answer. Pretty much everything is a ‘chemical substance’ – even humans are just made up of chemicals. Generally a medicine will consist of an active ingredient, along with other ingredients to help this ingredient get into our body. A good way to prove this is to measure the mass of a paracetamol tablet (typically sold as 500 mg tablets, which is the same as half a gram). The mass of the tablet is actually more than 0.5g because it also includes the mass of some chemicals which form the tablet. In the same way, painkiller containing syrups for children are mostly water.

      There can be some confusion between what a drug and a medicine actually is. If you look them up in the dictionary, they sound very similar by definition – but you would get a very different reaction walking into a room and saying ‘I am on drugs’ compared to saying ‘I take medicine’!

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