Ethnicity and Substance Abuse: Prevention and Intervention

This book offers a fresh, interdisciplinary approach to understanding drug abuse problems within the U.S. ethnic minority community, including African American, Asian Pacific American, Hispanics, and Native Americans. It brings together a wide range of current drug abuse and health issues, research, and model practices of prevention and intervention strategies pertaining to ethnic minority populations. Although this book focuses most of its attention on ethnic minority substance abusers, considerable mention is made of their White peers, too. Thus, the authors offer cultural points and counterpoints all of them given to achieve three objectives: (1) to make care providers aware of cultural factors that affect substance abuse and cessation; (2) to review multidisciplinary research studies in order to ascertain helpful and unhelpful health care practices; and (3) to provide practical suggestions for improving community-wide substance prevention and intervention programs. The book tries to answer three questions: What kind of treatment and services do most ethnic minority substance abusers receive in our nation's hospitals, clinics and other community rehabilitation facilities? How effective are those programs? What can be done, when necessary, to improve the quality of treatment and services? The triadic relationship between culture, ethnicity and substance use is evident in answers to those questions. Implicit throughout this volume is the authors' belief that how care is given to substance abusers is just as important as what kind of care they receive. Therefore, it is also a goal of this book to be of value to college and university professors, substance abuse workshop presenters, and in-service consultants who prepare professional helpers and paraprofessionals to render quality services to substance abusers.