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.

Adolescent substance abuse is the nation's #1 public health problem. It originates out of a developmental era where experimentation with the world is increasingly taking place, and where major changes in physical self and social relationships are taking place. These changes cannot be understood by any one discipline nor can they be described by focusing only on the behavioral and social problems of this age period, the characteristics of normal development, or the pharmacology and addictive potential of specific drugs. They require knowledge of the brain's systems of reward and control, genetics, psychopharmacology, personality, child development, psychopathology, family dynamics, peer group relationships, culture, social policy, and more. Drawing on the expertise of the leading researchers in this field, this Handbook provides the most comprehensive summarization of current knowledge about adolescent substance abuse. The Handbook is organized into eight sections covering the literature on the developmental context of this life period, the epidemiology of adolescent use and abuse, similarities and differences in use, addictive potential, and consequences of use for different drugs; etiology and course as characterized at different levels of mechanistic analysis ranging from the genetic and neural to the behavioural and social. Two sections cover the clinical ramifications of abuse, and prevention and intervention strategies to most effectively deal with these problems. The Handbook's last section addresses the role of social policy in framing the problem, in addressing it, and explores its potential role in alleviating it.

Substance and Behavioral Addictions: Concepts, Causes, and Cures presents the concepts, etiology, assessment, prevention, and cessation of substance (tobacco, alcohol, other drugs, and food) and behavioral (gambling, Internet, shopping, love, sex, exercise, and work) addictions. The text provides a novel and integrative appetitive motivation framework of addiction, while acknowledging and referencing multi-level influences on addiction, such as neurobiological, cognitive, and micro-social and macro-social/physical environmental. The book discusses concurrent and substitute addiction, and offers prevention and treatment solutions, which are presented from a more integrative perspective than traditional presentations. This is an ideal text for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, practitioners, and researchers.

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.