Understanding Drug Use Research Articles

Drugs and Gender

This article investigates how 44 self-defined drug users in the Stockholm area talk about differences in male and female drug use. The analysis shows that there is a general uneasiness among the informants regarding gendered drug taking. Ambivalence thus arises when the informants are called upon to articulate issues regarding gender and drugs. On the other hand, it is evident that gender is a meaningful construct for the informants' understanding of drug use. The informants assign different characteristics to men and women and they articulate a gendered norm system in relation to drug taking. The relevant norms, demanding more control of female than male drug users, were invoked by both the men and the women interviewed. Although gender was a useful construct for making sense of drug use, the informants lacked resources for articulating their experiences and points of view in relation to issues of drugs and gender. As such gender and its relationship to drug use constituted ambivalent and contradictory themes to talk about. In this regard, this study highlights gender and drug use as an arena in which there is currently no stable definition of the situation.

Substance Use in Ethnic Minority Youth

As evidenced in the literature, there has been a recent interest in understanding drug and alcohol use in ethnic minority populations, particularly among adolescents. Although epidemiological and treatment outcome research involving substance use and abuse has improved among ethnic minority groups, this information has yet to be sufficientiy integrated. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the extent of drug and alcohol use and related problems among ethnic minority youth, including patterns of use and treatment implications and recommendations.

Exploring racial and ethnic differences in recreational drug use among gay and bisexual men in New York city and Los Angeles.

Reported rates of recreational drug use among gay and bisexual men are currently rising. Although there has been much empirical research documenting current trends in drug use among gay and bisexual men, little research has empirically contrasted differential rates across urban epicenters, while even less has addressed racial or ethnic variation (between and within cities). This knowledge is essential both for the development of effective culturally-sensitive health education prevention/services and for understanding drug use prevalence among urban epicenters. Using the men's data gathered from large-scale gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) community events in New York and Los Angeles in the fall of 2003 and spring of 2004 (N = 2,335), this study explored racial and ethnic variance in the use of methamphetamine, cocaine, MDMA/ecstasy (methylenedioxy-methamphetamine), ketamine, GHB (gamma-hydroxy-butyrate), marijuana, and nitrate inhalants (poppers) among gay and bisexual men both between and within cities (NYC and LA). Levels of recent drug use were fairly consistent between New York City and Los Angeles; however there was some between and within city racial and ethnic variance. In particular, Asian/Pacific Islander men were among those least likely to report use of some drugs. Findings suggest substance use in the gay community permeates geographic boundaries in addition to some racial and ethnic boundaries such that interventions targeting drug-using gay and bisexual men should appropriately attend to racial and ethnic diversity within communities.

In a class of its own: Introducing a new tool for understanding adolescents' perceptions of the world of drugs

Objective To describe the use of (draw, describe and write', a tool for exploring how adolescents perceive and explain their understanding of the world of drugs, as used in the development of the Blueprint project. Design A cross-sectional study using a specifically designed research tool, including drawing and open-ended questions, used with young people aged 11-13 years to record their understanding of drug use. Setting Eight secondary schools in four areas of England. Method Open-ended questionnaire: 'Draw, describe and write' is an illuminative method based on constructivist/interpretivist approaches. Respondents were invited to'describe or draw' a young person who uses drugs. Further open-ended questions explored the drugs used, the context of drug use and the risks and benefits to the young person and the respondent. Results A response rate of 85 per cent was achieved. A random sample were analysed. The results provide a valuable insight into how 11-13 year olds perceive and understand drug use by young people. The method is acceptable to young people and their teachers and is strongly inclusive. This tool will be useful in curriculum development and in evaluation of drug education intervention studies for pupils of secondary school age range. Conclusion The method could be used in further studies where it is important to understand young people's perceptions of the complex context of the drug using world in which they are growing up.

Drugs, the democratic civilising process and the consumer society

The present article addresses the question of why drug use became an important phenomenon in the Western world and remained so. Even in scientific literature drug use is most often treated as ‘problematic’ behaviour. On the contrary, the present article argues that existing sociological models that have been used to grasp other cultural pursuits that are accepted as ‘normal’ and not as intrinsically ‘problematic’ can be fruitfully applied to understanding drug use. Two concepts will be discussed, namely that of Norbert Elias’ of the ‘civilising process’ and that of the ‘consumer society’. Firstly, the direction of the ‘civilising process’ has during the 20th century been for a part reversed. Though within boundaries set by continuing self-control, the body and the affects are readmitted into the public sphere. Drug use is part of this ambivalent phenomenon of ‘controlled de-control’. Secondly, the attractiveness of drugs expresses general preferences of the consumer society for the ‘wasteful’ and the ‘dream-like’; qualities which drugs epitomise in the most pronounced way.

Prior cigarette smoking initiation predicting current alcohol use: Evidence for a gateway drug effect among California adolescents from eleven ethnic groups

Gateway drug theory provides a useful framework for understanding drug use among adolescent populations. Studies have reported a gateway effect of cigarette smoking on alcohol use among adolescents; but there is a lack of knowledge regarding ethnic differences in this effect. Using data from a cross-sectional survey in California, 11,239 subjects (46.3% male) from 31 high schools with at least 25% of total enrollment of Asian and at least 200 students with Asian ancestry entered the analysis. Among them, 6016 were ninth graders (mean age=14.3, S.D.=0.49) and 5223 were twelfth graders (mean age=17.3, S.D.=0.54). After controlling for seven variables, the risk ratio of last 30-day alcohol use among prior smoking initiators vs. noninitiators was 5.82 for non-Hispanic Whites, 4.25 for Blacks, 8.37 for Asian Indians, 3.99 for Chinese, 3.45 for Filipinos, 3.48 for Japanese, 5.41 for Koreans, 7.57 for Vietnamese, 4.02 for Mexicans, 2.64 for South/Central Americans, and 5.95 for adolescents with multiethnic background. Comparison of the 11 ethnic groups indicated that adolescents from different ethnic groups but with similar cultural background had a similar risk level; such pattern existed after controlling for acculturation, parents' monitoring, and school performance. The risk ratio did not differ by gender and grade. There is an association between prior cigarette smoking initiation and current alcohol use among adolescents from different ethnic backgrounds, including those of multiethnicity, which supports the generalizability of gateway drug effect of cigarette smoking on alcohol use. Studies should be conducted to investigate factors attributable to the ethnic variations of this association.

CHANGING PATTERNS OF “DRUG ABUSE” IN THE UNITED STATES: CONNECTING FINDINGS FROM MACRO- AND MICROEPIDEMIOLOGIC STUDIES

Trend analyses of the U.S. monitoring data systems (the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse and the Monitoring the Future Study) and of the country's surveillance program, the Community Epidemiology Work Group (CEWG), indicate that several new “drug abuse” patterns have emerged over the past several years. For adolescents, drug use rates are converging for females and males, the mean age at which youngsters initiate drug use has declined, and more young adolescents are reporting using drugs. Furthermore, emergent new drug use patterns are being observed by the CEWG. The use of drugs such as Rohypnol, the injecting of crack-cocaine, and the spread of methamphetamines by new traffickers challenge our existing knowledge and understanding of drug use and its prevention. The National Institute on Drug Abuse has funded several large longitudinal studies that follow selected children and adolescents into their twenties, and some into their thirties. This research has been a rich source of information on the determinants of initiating and continuing drug abuse. Yet the findings from the surveys have not been well explored by the longitudinal studies, nor have the findings from the longitudinal studies been used in the surveys to better understand the observed changing trends in drug use patterns. This paper addresses six issues that have been observed from the findings from analyses of data from the surveys or macro-epidemiologic studies. Information from the sub-population or micro-epidemiologic studies are reviewed for possible hypotheses to explain each issue. Suggestions for further research and implications for prevention also are presented.

The Changing Context of Production of Knowledge in the Drugs Field

Knowledge produced by research in the fields of social sciences, psychology, law and medicine is a main ingredient in the construction of science-based knowledge on which we want to base current drug policy. This thematic issue of Contemporary Drug Problems is devoted to exploring the context of the construction of knowledge in the drugs field and to describing and analyzing recent changes in the science-- policy relationship. Large-scale processes such as Europeanization, modernization, privatization, individualization and decentralization each can contribute to changes in the context of production of knowledge. The papers in this issue show how production of knowledge and construction of evidence are influenced by these large-scale processes. We all know that interpretations and the balance of influence between different interests are important when science-based knowledge is constructed. Our aim is to give insight into how it is constructed. How is the science-policy relationship formed by institutional forces? What role has research-based knowledge played in policy-making in the drugs field? Do we see new roles in the future? The access of research-based knowledge into the construction of policy is dependent on the institutional and historical context in which this knowledge is produced. The articles present experiences from the Nordic countries, from Britain, and from the European Union. The golden triangle between the state, the citizens and the experts is constructed differently in national traditions and in international institutions. What is common is that research in the drug and alcohol fields has been quite closely tied to public administration and policy-making structures. Political changes therefore impact on the questions asked in research. When hierarchies in the political system change, the research in the drugs field changes as well. We want to elaborate on how institutional constraints determine the influence of research-based knowledge and form the process of production in itself, including the choice of methods and informants. Institutional constraints determine identification, norms and values among the participants. The questions raised in the papers can to a variable extent be tied to the processes of decentralization, Europeanization and modernization. These processes impact on ideologies and formal structures that change the context of production of knowledge. These processes are interwoven; our aim is to identify some effects of the processes and to reflect on the situation for research-based knowledge in the present context. Decentralization and the change in public health policy The dismantling of the model of centralized prevention directed toward the whole population was very clear in Nordic alcohol policy during the 1990s. Marja Holmila gives an introduction into the history of research on communitybased intervention in the wake of the political change that took place during this period. This political change represents a change in the context for production of knowledge. First, the decentralization process contributes to an increasing concentration on treatment instead of on primary prevention. At local levels, risk groups are given priority. Holmila furthermore gives an overview of the growth of the new research field that has developed as a result of the increasing activity in community-based interventions. This shift of focus from the national population to risk groups is a part of the spread of a post-addiction model, described by Robin Bunton. While Holmila identifies future needs of research on the meaning of community ties and a new understanding of the concept of prevention, Bunton points out the absence of everyday knowledge in our understanding of drug use. When the focus changes from the whole population to individual identities and preferences, there is a need for new methods and perhaps other research traditions. Decentralization is a process that goes together with an increasing focus on the individual instead of on national citizenship. …

Drug Use in Prison: the experience of young offenders

This article explores young offenders' drug use in prison. Qualitative research with inmates highlighted the importance of understanding drug use in prison as a continuum of behaviour, where inmates' drug use inside was related to their drug use before custody. The inmates made choices and decisions around their drug use inside, considering the compatibility of drugs with the prison environment and their need to seek the 'right high'. Availability of drugs was crucial and the article discusses the routes of drug supply into prison via visits and the informal prison economy, where the distribution of drugs was facilitated by close inmate friendship networks.

Drug Use in Prison: the experience of young offenders

This article explores young offenders' drug use in prison. Qualitative research with inmates highlighted the importance of understanding drug use in prison as a continuum of behaviour, where inmates' drug use inside was related to their drug use before custody. The inmates made choices and decisions around their drug use inside, considering the compatibility of drugs with the prison environment and their need to seek the 'right high'. Availability of drugs was crucial and the article discusses the routes of drug supply into prison via visits and the informal prison economy, where the distribution of drugs was facilitated by close inmate friendship networks.

The Perfect Timing for Understanding Drug Use and Abuse

The Perfect Timing for Understanding Drug Use and Abuse

Strategies for Understanding Drug Use in the 21st Century: Preface

Strategies for Understanding Drug Use in the 21st Century: Preface

Book: Review/Commentary: Coca, Cocaine, and the Bolivian Reality

Coca, Cocaine, and the Bolivian Reality, edited by Madeline Barbara Leons and Harry Sanabria (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), xii+310 pp., $19.95 (paper). Everyone agrees that a multidisciplinary approach is needed if we are to understand drug use and its outcomes. However, few have brought together such diverse and complementary perspectives as anthropologists Madeline Leons and Harry Sanabria, who focus-for a change-on a poor nation that produces the raw material. By telling us about what's happening in Bolivia, a country that hardly looms large in the worldview of most outsiders, the several contributors provide grassroots views that are rarely encountered, and show linkages between domestic and international, private and governmental, legal and illegal systems that are involved in transforming a traditional agricultural product into a valuable drug on streets halfway around the world. The authors of Coca, Cocaine, and the Bolivian Reality include specialists in history, economics, applied sociology, education, political science, ecology, and anthropology. All have lengthy experience in Bolivia. Each chapter is brief, well organized, and amply documented. The editors set the stage with a history of coca, with an emphasis on recent changes as other nations (especially the United States) progressively intervened with a war against drugs. Alison L. Spedding (a coca farmer and trader herself) contributes two chapters. In the first, she describes the growing and processing of coca in considerable detail, showing how it is intimately interwoven with the total fabric of values, social relationships, and other activities of the community. In her other chapter she chronicles the stormy struggle over control of the coca trade that has taken place since the 1970s, and describes forms of peasant resistance to recurrent national and international campaigns to eradicate coca. Elayne Zorn shows how seasonal migration from the overpopulated altiplano zone to the sparsely settled subtropical Chapare area, where coca has recently become a major cash crop, has changed traditional weaving and clothing styles in communities far removed from coca and cocaine. Ana Maria Lema traces the major role that large landowners in the Yungas region, where coca has been produced for domestic consumption since Inca times, played in shaping the modern Bolivian state. On the basis of her intimate familiarity with the area before and after the boom of the 1980s, Madeline Barbara Leons uses the Yungas as a case study demonstrating how and why campaigns to substitute other crops for coca have failed and are likely to continue to do so; peasants seem to understand agricultural economics better than bureaucrats do. …

Misadventures in the Drug Trade

Dan Waldorf was a research sociologist who worked in the field of drug use and abuse for 27 years. Most of that time was either in San Francisco or New York City. He wrote two books, three monographs, and 38 articles on the subject–with this being his final article. Fate intervened because this article is autobiographical. Dan's work and his life were intertwined in ways that provided unique insights into drugs and addict lifestyles. The focus of much of his work was “to attack and demolish myths about drug users and heroin addicts” (his words). Dan's legacy is broad ranging, including historical accounts of morphine users and the federal response to close down morphine clinics in the first quarter of this century; he made snowball sampling methods respectable; he saw rationality in the actions of heroin addicts and demonstrated this drug was not all-consuming; and he performed a similar service for cocaine. He struggled to maintain his career as a drug researcher, often without the support of federal monies. As recently as two years before his death, he traveled around the country to document the history of underground needle exchange programs that were developing–using his retirement savings. This article documents his many scientific contributions to our understanding of drug use in general, and the interface of drug use and crime in particular. Dan led a simple yet ever so rich life because he never shied away from telling the truth, and the wisdom of his vision helped so many others of us to see. That is his greatest legacy-and his gift. [Translations are provided in the International s Section of this issue.]

Segregation or Cooperation? A Social Constructionist Perspective on Drug Use and Drug Work

The basic assumptions of a social constructionist perspective and its utility for understanding drug use and drug work are delineated. The analysis of the history of drug use and the example of Vietnam veterans and the way they dealt with opiate use show the wide variability and differences in social constructions of drug use. Current disease conceptions as well as the model of accepting drug work are explicated and their consequences for opiate users, treatment conceptions and professionals in the field are described. The image of the drug user in the disease model is very negative and deficit oriented; moreover the differences between a drug-using individual and the “normal” person are stressed and thus these worlds are segregated from one another. In contrast, accepting drug work is resource oriented and tries not to reduce the person to his or her drug use. By stressing the commonalities between the “drug” and the “normal world” the segregation between them is challenged. Some remarks about how new social constructions about drug use might be established through language and social institutions close the paper.

Antibiotic therepy in renal failure

【There continues to be increasing the number of patients being treated for renal failure day by day due to lot of causes. It is prerequsite for the physician to have a proper understanding of drug use in patients with renal failure since kidney is the major route of elimination for many kinds of drugs and their metabolites. In order to provide practical guidelines for prescribing antibiotics, the literature has been reviewed, and summarized. The tables presented here are made by Dr. William M Bennett et al. and listed the specific pharmacokinetic information such as drug half life, serum levels, and drug removal during dialysis, plasma protein binding, volume of distribution.】

Toward a Biblical Perspective on Drug Use

ABSTRACT Alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs exact a terrible toll of suffering and death in society. A biblical basis is explored for personal and public policy toward alcohol and other drug use. The complexity of a biblical view includes not only the nature of drugs, but considerations related to dose, motivation for use, and actual or potential harm. The sinfulness of an act of drug use, from a biblical perspective, depends upon such factors. This view moves beyond an individual, offender-focused view toward an understanding of drug use that recognizes our communal responsibility for problems and solutions.

Pharmacology and fashion

The use of mind-altering drugs would appear to be a near-universal human attribute, across known historical t ime and the otherwise complex twists-and-turns of custom and culture revealed by social anthropology. What history and anthropology also reveal, however, is that the social meanings of drug use are subject to many forms of shift and change. So that at different times and in different places what is to be defined as a 'drug ' , what forms of drug use are to be regarded as acceptable or unacceptable, the way in which any given drug is to be used, and how the use of drugs is to be socially controlled, are matters which are addressed in sometimes radically different ways. The same drug in different cultures can even be associated with different and opposed meanings in terms of its psychopharmacological effects as.Ruth Benedict (1961) noted in her discussion of the Pueblo Indians who, although they sometimes used powerful hallucinogenics such as datura ( j imson-weed or ' loco ' weed) did not associate their use with the production of visions as did their neighbours such as the Apache, but rather incorporated datura use in rituals such as one which aimed to detect the identity of a thief. These kinds of variations in the social meanings attached to drugs must clearly be situated centrally in any attempt to understand drug use or to combat the potential i l l-effects of drug misuse (Pearson, 1992a). Indeed, so profound is this social construction of reality that it suggests to some commentators that drug policies are merely arbitrary. It is only one small step further in this line of thinking to view drug controls as unnecessary. There are many complexit ies within different arguments for the ' legal izat ion ' or 'de-cr iminal izat ion ' of drugs (Nadelman, 1992), and not all of them direct ly invoke the concept o f cultural relativism. Some of these arguments proceed from an economic basis, involving free market principles or cost-benefi t analysis, while others invoke a libertarian morality in favour of the free expression of individual choices. While some issues from the political Left and others from

HIV in Britain 1982–1990: the Christian Reaction

’ “I’d shoot my son if he had AIDS”, says Vicar’, was a tabloid headline only four years ago. Thankfully, most Christians have moved on from that type of reaction. Nevertheless, the variety of Christian responses covers a wide spectrum of opinion and practice. In this respect Christians are no different from many other people in society. The Churches reflect and consolidate the values and mores of the society of which they are a part. The overall challenge for Christians facing HIV/AIDS, as well as many other contemporary issues, is how to be prophetic. This means not simply falling into a reactionary mould, but analysing what is happening in the pandemic of HIV, reflecting upon this reality and after much listening to people’s needs, discerning whether the Churches have anything valuable to say.It is important to distinguish institutional Christian responses, reflected in official statements, and the action on the ground by Christians of all denominations. In some responses there is convergence of view, in others informed dissent from ‘official’ lines. It is also important to note the context within which the debates about pastoral responses to AIDS/HIV take place, for these touch on other lively issues such as the right to life, understanding drug use, sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular. If society at large shows discomfort in dealing with these and some of the other major issues which AIDS raises, such as death and dying or the politics of health care, then it is hardly surprising that the Churches have been faltering in their first steps to respond.

Explaining adolescent drug use: an elaboration strategy for structural equations modeling.

We report a series of analyses designed to estimate increasingly elaborated theoretical models that explain adolescent drug use. Each of the successive elaborations adds a theoretical construct to the explanatory model in order to increase our understanding of drug use by specifying in greater detail the nature of the structural relationships among the latent variables. The more detailed specification is accomplished by 1) specifying new direct effects that increase explained variance in drug use, 2) decomposing direct effects through the interpolation of hypothesized intervening variables, 3) specifying antecedents of variables that modify their direct effects, and 4) exposing suppressor effects. Where indicated, we evaluate alternative explanations of the observed relationships. We do this by controlling for common antecedent effects to reduce spuriousness or by examining different specifications of causal linkages among the explanatory constructs.