Chemical Dependency And The African American

Chemical Dependency and the African American Second Edition

Throughout the African American community, individuals and organizations ranging from churches to schools to drug treatment centers are fighting the widespread use of crack cocaine. To put that fight in a larger cultural context, Doin' Drugs explores historical patterns of alcohol and drug use from pre-slavery Africa to present-day urban America. William Henry James and Stephen Lloyd Johnson document the role of alcohol and other drugs in traditional African cultures, among African slaves before the American Civil War, and in contemporary African American society, which has experienced the epidemics of marijuana, heroin, crack cocaine, and gangs since the beginning of this century. The authors zero in on the interplay of addiction and race to uncover the social and psychological factors that underlie addiction. James and Johnson also highlight many culturally informed programs, particularly those sponsored by African American churches, that are successfully breaking the patterns of addiction. The authors hope that the information in this book will be used to train a new generation of counselors, ministers, social workers, nurses, and physicians to be better prepared to face the epidemic of drug addiction in African American communities.

This book is dedicated to the prevention, treatment, and recovery of African Americans with substance use disorders. African Americans are disproportionately represented in the addictions, criminal justice, and child welfare systems. It is clear that, when their culturally specific needs are not met, they are vulnerable to continuous relapse and the revolving door syndrome. There has been little written that focuses exclusively on prevention, treatment, and recovery among African Americans. This book was written to fill this gap. It is an important contribution to the field of behavioral health, providing a much-needed treasure trove of important knowledge from specialists, including physicians, psychologists, educators, social workers, addictions counselors, public health specialists, researchers, the clergy, as well as individuals in recovery. This volume adds significantly to the knowledge base of practitioners and researchers whose work focuses on prevention, treatment, and recovery in African American communities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly.

Chemical Dependency: Women at Risk shows readers how to design and implement drug and alcohol treatment programs that take into account not only gender but also the cultural differences among women. Whether you’re a counselor, researcher, or health care provider, this book will show you how to abandon ‘one-size-fits-all’treatment approaches that fail to address the individual needs of women undergoing substance abuse treatment. Instead, you’ll learn to recognize and respect cultural and individual differences among women. Use this book as a guide to develop your own innovative multicultural treatment approaches to substance abuse. Chemical Dependency offers a three-stage cultural assessment model that serves as a key starting point for transforming your services into culture-, gender-, and ethnic-sensitive programs. You’ll acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to develop recovery services that identify patterns of belief and customs that can assist or hinder women in achieving and maintaining recovery. Readers of Chemical Dependency discover the obstacles to the development of effective women’s recovery programs, as well as key service elements of successful recovery programs. In addition, they witness firsthand how to integrate an understanding of women’s lives from a multigenerational and life span perspective with consideration of issues such as sexuality, violence and sexual abuse, and codependence and parenting. As a result, professionals in the field at all levels are equipped with the necessary know-how for providing services to underserved women and offering them the assistance they so desperately need to overcome their substance abuse problems. Chemical Dependency provides readers with the most comprehensive analysis to date of marijuana addiction in women with effective methodss for outreach, intervention, treatment, and research. The techniques it offers for establishing discussion frameworks for sexuality and HIV in the context of recovery can be incorporated immediately into existing treatment programs, as can its strategies to assist lesbians and bisexual women in confronting the trauma they suffer as a result of addiction, sexism, and societal homophobia. The book’s authors are professionals in the fields of treatment, research, prevention, community organizing, and policymaking. Readers acquire from their collaborative effort an understanding of alcohol and drug addiction as a complex ‘bio-psycho-social-spiritual’disease. Counselors, researchers, health care providers, and faculty and students of chemical dependency programs will find Chemical Dependency an invaluable guidebook for the development or improvement of their own approaches to successful intervention and treatment of women susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse.

We live in an era of substance misuse colliding with public health shortcomings. Consequences of mass incarceration and other racial disparities of the "drug war" are felt acutely in the neighborhoods and communities least equipped to deal with them. More than 600,000 people are released from US prisons each year; nearly two-thirds of returning citizens have a substance use disorder (SUD) and have limited access to treatment. Even among the general public, only one in ten people with SUD receive any type of specialty treatment. Community organizations make important contributions to improve access and help to heal these societal fractures. Using a social ecology of resilience model, Addiction Recovery and Resilience is a yearslong ethnographic case study of a faith-based health organization with a focus on long-term recovery. It explores the organization's triumphs and missteps as it has worked to respond to the opioid crisis and improve the health of affiliates and the neighborhood for nearly twenty years. Addiction Recovery and Resilience concludes with best practices for individual, organizational, and community health and public policy at a time when nontraditional health care providers are increasingly important.

Suitable for use by students preparing to take the Certified Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Counselor (CASAC) exams, this text provides and introduction to alcoholism and drug addiction.