The Social Construction of the Minority Drug Problem

Introduction Drug use by minority youth has traditionally been described as a dysfunctional effort to escape problems stemming from poverty and racism or as an alternative means of making money in the face of underclass isolation from legitimate economic opportunities (Merton, 1957; Cloward and Ohlin, 1960; Finestone, 1957; Williams, 1990; Harrell and Peterson, 1992; Currie, 1993). This thinking on the nature of drug use among minorities finds its way into the research and policy literature that defines the minority drug user by employing code words like "high risk youth," "underclass drug user," or "hard-core drug user." The minority drug user is then represented as more dangerous, deviant, and prone to abuse drugs than is his middle-class counterpart because he is reacting to social pressures that only affect urban ghetto or underclass communities. These communities are characterized by high aggregate levels of unemployment, welfare, mother-only households, crime, poverty, and other measures of "social breakdown." In effect, this literature separates the problem of drug use by minority youth from that of majority juveniles. After all, the drug use of majority youth more frequently occurs in the confines of stable and affluent communities where aggregate social conditions do not disadvantage them or place them at greater risk for seeking to escape with drugs. Hence, their recreational use of drugs is more likely to be portrayed as normative, functional, or even as an essentially harmless part of adolescent development. Even when harmful use is acknowledged among majority youth, it is not defined in terms of aggregate community characteristics that place the adolescent at risk. Instead, an effort is made to distinguish middle-class dysfunctional drug abusers from casual, functioning users in terms of individual factors. This long-standing tendency in the research and policy literature to categorize minority drug use as dangerous and dysfunctional in the aggregate and to distinguish it from drug use among majority group adolescents shores up policies that encourage community crackdowns and punishment of threatening, high-risk, inner-city minority drug users. Indeed, implementation of these policies has led to a recent explosion in the number of black adolescents arrested and convicted on drug charges, even as the proportion of white juvenile drug arrests and convictions has declined (Tonry, 1995; Blumstein, 1993; Mauer, 1996). Moreover, these changes have occurred even though the major self-report surveys on drug use continue to show that black youth are considerably less likely to use drugs than are white youth (Johnston et al., 1995; SAMHSA, 1996). Despite this glaring inconsistency between theory and fact, minority youth continue to be represented as "high risk" because of their residence in disadvantaged, socially disorganized communities. This article examines how the minority drug problem is framed in terms of anomie and underclass models that suggest drug subcultures in our nation's black ghettos are formed as an adaptation to aggregate community conditions. It considers how drug researchers make use of ecological and ethnographic data to back up their claims that inner-city drug subcultures are a response to ghetto-specific conditions and raises problems associated with using such data to uphold these assertions. I look at how the majority drug problem is framed by a separate research literature that accounts for the causes of experimental and social use in the middle class by using a normative model and describes dysfunctional drug use among majority youth in terms of individual differences - as opposed to aggregate conditions. Then I focus on how this compartmentalization of minority and majority drug problems extends beyond the etiological literature to the literature on drug epidemics; hence, trends in minority and majority drug use also receive separate treatment. Findings on race differences in drug use from national surveys are then reviewed. …