New Drugs on the Street

Changing Inner City Patterns of Illicit Consumption

Merrill Singer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780789030504
• eBook ISBN: 9781317954682
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Learn the public health implications of shifting drug-related risks among the inner city poor

Inner city drug use behavior shifts and changes, leaving past drug treatment programs, drug prevention efforts, health care provisions for drug users, and social service practice unprepared to effectively respond. New Drugs on the Street: Changing Inner City Patterns of Illicit Consumption tackles this problem by presenting the latest ethnographic and epidemiological studies of emerging and changing drug use behaviors in the inner city. This one-of-a-kind resource provides the latest research to help readers reconceptualize ways to think about today's drug use to more effectively address the growing problem.

Unless public health and social service professionals keep in step with the shifting patterns of drug behaviors, drug use epidemics will inevitably unfold. New Drugs on the Street reveals the latest drug use practices of the poor in the inner city, with a concentration on the research in African-American and Latino populations. Each chapter gives an in-depth look at the use of various psychotropic drugs most recently gaining popularity, along with the surprising reemergence of PCP. The rampant use of ecstasy in the rave scene is explored, along with the effects of its heavy use, its after-effects, the likelihood of poly-drug mixing, and dangerous sex risk behaviors. Urban youth drug networking is examined in detail. The alarming use of embalming fluid mixtures is discussed, along with the disturbing public health implications of its use. The illicit use of narcotics analgesics (NA) like Vicodin and other pain killers is also explored, including the unclear association between NA use and Hepatitis C. A final chapter presents the latest information on Haitian youth and young adults in Miami, Florida, with ethnographic background to illustrate the reasons for drug use in this and other ethnic minorities. This valuable source is extensively referenced and includes several helpful tables to clarify research data.

New Drugs on the Street examines:

• ecstasy
  
• diverted pharmaceutical painkillers
  
• PCP
  
• embalming fluid
  
• narcotics analgesics (NA)
  
• drug use dynamics
  
• the changing street drug scene
  
• new drug combinations
  
• new drug-involved populations
  
  

New Drugs on the Street reveals the nature and direction of the latest drug use and is essential reading for health professionals in the health social sciences, public health, nursing, and substance abuse fields that deal with low income, ethnic minority, and inner city populations.

Response to Trauma in Haitian Youth at Risk

Richard Douyon, PhD
Louis Herns Marcelin, PhD
Michèle Jean-Gilles, PhD
J. Bryan Page, PhD

SUMMARY. In order to characterize undesirable behavior (drug use, fighting, criminal activity) among Haitian youth at risk and determine the relationship between traumatic experience and that kind of behavior, investigators recruited 292 Haitian youths via networks of informal social relations in two zones of Miami/Dade County strongly identified with Haitian ethnicity. Each recruit responded to an interview schedule eliciting sociodemographic information and self-reported activities, including involvement in youth-dominated groups. They also reported traumatic experience. Clinicians administered CAPS to a subset of those respondents who self-reported traumatic experience. Staff ethnographers selected respondents for in-depth interviews and family studies to provide contextual depth for findings of the interview schedule and the CAPS assessments. Although traumatic experience may still play a role in mental health outcomes among children, childhood victimization among Haitian children does not appear to be related to the drug use and undesirable behaviors associated with unsupervised youth, including formation of gangs. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <docdelivery@ haworthpress.com> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> ©2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS. Haitians, trauma, drug selling

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

Haitians in Miami have had the misfortune of encountering some of the most daunting barriers ever presented to an immigrant group. Not only have some of them made the trip to South Florida in the flimsiest of craft through dangerous seas, but many have sojourned for months or years under hostile conditions in the Bahamas before finally making their way to Miami. Once on shore in Dade County, the new arrivals have faced a community that has routinely ghettoized populations of color during most of its existence. Urbanized areas have well-defined zones inhabited by people of African descent whether they are North American, Bahamian, Jamaican, or other Caribbean. Although all housing is officially open by law, the population of the County clearly has compartmentalized phenotypes by geographic areas (Dunn, 1997; Peacock, Morrow, and Gladwin, 1997; Portes and Stepick, 1993). In this kind of racialized setting, the continued marginalization of a population descended from enslaved Africans hardly surprises.

Factors that have exacerbated this tendency to marginalize Haitian immigrants in Miami/Dade County include their supposed linkage with disease and superstition, and recently, association with juvenile crime. Just as the population of Haitian immigrants achieved a recognizable size and cohesion, about 1982, they registered on the Centers for Disease Control’s monitors for the newly emergent disease complex, AIDS (Nachman and Dreyfus, 1986). Haitian immigrants’ tuberculosis also brought them unwanted attention from North American health and immigration authorities (Nachman, 1993). Some authors (e.g., Moore and LeBaron, 1986) hinted darkly that Haiti had been a major conduit for HIV into the United States. Later analyses of the pandemic have shown the reverse to be true (Farmer, 1998). Nevertheless, the early indication by the CDC that having Haitian background constituted a risk factor for AIDS did gratuitous and irreparable damage to the Haitian community’s image, especially in South Florida. This blaming of Haitians as unclean, disease-ridden interlopers has led to ongoing prejudice against them, and it has moved them, as a community, to distrust overtures by researchers, especially if the researchers want to study AIDS or tuberculosis (Wingerd and Page, 1997).

Conditions of poverty, unemployment, and underemployment have persisted in South Florida’s Haitian population despite the notable willingness of these newcomers to spend additional energy acquiring schooling that had not been available in Haiti. Although gathering large-scale demographic data on the Haitian population in South Florida presents difficulties (see Stepick and Stepick, 1990), it has become clear that a large proportion of that population still lives in conditions of overcrowding and poverty (Stepick and Stepick, 1992). The location of these Haitian Americans in the mix of ethnicities living in Dade County is contiguous with neighborhoods inhabited by other groups that had been marginalized earlier, including African Americans and African descended Caribbean people. This location is hostile territory, especially for Haitian children trying to attend public schools in these neighborhoods. Furthermore, the lifeways of the “host” cultural context in which these children attempt to learn how to become “Americans” often communicate the futility of education and the attractiveness of “outlaw” or “gangsta” life, perhaps as a reflection of the “host’s” own marginality. Formation of youth gangs has occurred among almost every culturally distinctive immigrant group that has arrived in the United States since 1860 (Goldstein, 1990), but under the conditions described above, the specific adaptations of inner city Haitian youth in the U.S. demand close examination.

The present study of Haitian Youth in Miami/Dade County attempts to define the responses of these youth to a hostile social and economic environment. Although the literature on gangs provides numerous templates for characterizing these responses (cf. Arnold, 1965; Cloward and Ohlin, 1955; Cohen, 1960; Elliott, Ageton, and Canter, 1979; Fagan, 1989; Furfey, 1926; Goldstein, 1991; Thrasher, 1927), we shall attempt here to use self-reported and observed behaviors to define the adaptations of Haitian youth, holding in abeyance our comparisons of these adaptations with those in the rest...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• New Drugs on the Street: An Introduction
• “Rollin’ on E”: A Qualitative Analysis of Ecstasy Use Among Inner City Adolescents and Young Adults
• The Diffusion of Ecstasy Through Urban Youth Networks
• When the Drug of Choice Is a Drug of Confusion: Embalming Fluid Use in Inner City Hartford, CT
• Under the Counter: The Diffusion of Narcotic Analgesics to the Inner City Street
• Response to Trauma in Haitian Youth at Risk
• Index