Drug Use And Ethnicity In Early Adolescence

This book presents new and important information about adolescent drug use. The book is intended for human service professionals, teachers, researchers, and students interested in the issue of early adolescent drug use and its causes and pervasiveness in a multiethnic population. Today, the field of adolescent drug use research relies on integrative models that permit competing explanations of drug use. This approach promotes flexibility in testing hypotheses pertinent to adol- cents of very different social and cultural backgrounds or personal characteristics. Longitudinal studies, including the one presented in these pages, have identified many risk and protective factors or processes that are linked to adolescent drug use. We review these throughout this book and present new information from our own research. Our point of departure is to extend and elaborate descriptive research and models of adolescent drug research to cover the unique and diverse experiences of adolescents who are Hispanic, African American, and White non-Hispanic.

This volume examines trajectories of drug use among ethnic minority youth in the United States with a focus on African Americans and Hispanics. It also highlights what research designs have been employed to address these differences as well as suggests strategies for moving this discourse forward by identifying potential targets for prevention and intervention with minority youth. This book features essays by leading experts in the field who have grappled with this issue for decades. Inside, readers will find an insightful dialogue that addresses such questions as: Why are African American and Hispanic youth more likely than their White peers to abstain from drug use during adolescence but are more likely to become problem users later in life? What impact does the stress caused by discrimination have on potential drug use? To what extent does religiosity protect minority youth from drug use as past research suggests that it protects White youth? What is the influence of neighborhood context on exposure to and use of substances among urban African American children? Taken together, the essays in this book identify underexplored risk and protective factors and gaps in the current state of knowledge that can be used to develop effective, culturally specific drug abuse prevention strategies. This book is for anyone with an interest in the initiation and escalation of drug use among African Americans and Hispanics/Latinos and factors that influence these patterns over the life course. It will also be an ideal resource for those interested in better understanding the mechanisms by which risk and protective factors are related to the development of drug use and addiction, particularly the ways in which such factors contribute to health differences and have disproportionately more negative consequences for ethnic minorities.

Provides an understanding of the nature of drug use among minorities by summarizing data on this issue. The data came from several large and small-scale epidemiological studies that collect and analyze data on the incidence, prevalence, morbidity, mortality, and other adverse health consequences of drug use among racial/ethnic populations. Chapters: definition of race and ethnicity; overview of drug use and drug related problems; population statistics for racial/ethnic minorities in the U.S.; drug use in the general population; prevalence of drug use among youth; youth drug use and risky behaviors; and adverse health consequences; drugs and crime.

This report considers to what extent linking adolescent educational successes and failures with drug use remain applicable to White, African-American, and Hispanic adolescents when analyzed as separate groups. The Education¿Drug Use Connection focused primarily on a nationwide sample of adolescents, first surveyed when they were nearing the end of 8th grade in the years 1991, 1992, and 1993, and followed biennially for eight years thereafter. It provides a wealth of detail, both in analyses and reporting. This report describes key regression findings briefly in the text, along with a good deal of further detail in the tables, and then presents the authors¿ conclusions.

Since 1992, marijuana use among 8th graders has tripled, among 10th graders it has nearly doubled, and its use among high school seniors has increased by 50 percent. The use of other illicit drugs is also heavily on the rise. Yet, there exists very little research and literature on the etiology and prevention of drug abuse among those most at risk--disadvantaged, inner-city, minority youth. The Etiology and Prevention of Drug Abuse Among Minority Youth is an important first step in remedying this gap in the literature and for getting at the heart of the psychosocial factors that promote and sustain drug use among minority youth. The book’s chapters evolved from a program of research funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and Cornell University Medical College’s Institute for Prevention Research concerning drug abuse prevention with multi-ethnic youth. So that you might learn effective strategies for intervening with at-risk adolescents and teenagers, The Etiology and Prevention of Drug Abuse Among Minority Youth discusses: correlates and predictors of alcohol and drug use community-based skills interventions how youths offset feelings of distress or self-derogation by bonding with deviant peers the advantages of community-oriented outreach programs the role of cultural factors as they shape vulnerability to adolescent alcohol and drug use the role of ethnic identity as a moderator of psychosocial risk for alcohol and marijuana use the needs of youth at high risk for future use preventing gateway drug use drug use among youth living in homeless shelters the conditions of public housing and how they affect the etiology of drug abuse An essential tool for policymakers, social workers, clinicians, researchers, psychiatrists, and other professionals in chemical dependency and narcotics rehabilitation, The Etiology and Prevention of Drug Abuse Among Minority Youth provides you with vital insight on the causes of drug use among minority adolescents, the strengths and limitations of different intervention approaches, and incentive to find appropriate ways for working with at-risk, minority teenagers.

doing poorly in school was a key predictor only for Asians. Social influences to use drugs and intentions to use them were the only predictors for Blacks. Although family disruption and limited parental education were associated with an increase in risk for white adolescents, the latter had the opposite effect for Hispanics and Blacks. The simple additive model worked almost as well as the most complicated logistic model in predicting hard drug use for each group except Blacks. Conclusions: These results suggest that curbing early initiation of marijuana and cigarettes and reducing prodrug influences and attitudes may dampen initiation of other substances for most youth. They also suggest that drug prevention programs need to be sensitive to differences across racial/ethnic groups and that using social background characteristics as indicators of risk can be very misleading. Carefully constructed risk scales based on simple additive models could help guide program development and provide clinicians with useful information about a troubled adolescent's likely trajectory.